Keith Glover's plays redefine musical theater; as a body of work, they are constructed in an effort to achieve unity between score and script. In his earliest plays Glover provides lyrical, often rhyming, lines for characters; in a play written in 1994 and produced in 1997, In Walks Ed, he uses jazz and blues recordings as the backdrop for his rhythm-infused dialogue. But his objective came to fruition in Thunder Knocking on the Door (1996), a play in which Glover designs the new musical--a dramatic work written over, under, and through by an original (and often improvised) blues score, one in which music and text become, in Glover's words, an "organic" entity.

Glover was born 18 February 1966 in Bessemer, Alabama, to Earnestine Glover and Jimmy Akines, a numbers hustler. Until he was six years old, Glover lived with his grandmother, Evelyn Glover, in Bessemer. Thereafter, he split the year between his grandmother's...