My grandmother had a beautiful voice and wanted to sing, but as an only child of an army chap, she spent a lot of time breaking men's hearts instead. Obviously, I haven't based the entire characterisation on her but it is a link. Were I not an actress but a woman living a hundred years ago... there but for the life I lead go I.Winning the audience's sympathy is the director's job.

In an ideal world, I would present her warts and all, but one is trying to make them understand, not to like, forgive or condone. When I started, I felt that Hedda was right across the road from me Now I'm walking along beside her. As an actor you just hope that the audience will join you there too.. "For me, it's a bit like, 'Hey, you're doing all this talking, but what are you really saying?' I think the importance of rap is more the intent It's a general expression of where American youth is at. The limitations point directly towards how society has failed people." But the speaker, Dana Bryant, admits a debt of gratitude to hip hop. When New York's recent explosion of performance-orientated poetry events - cafe and bar-room jams and slams - was reaching a peak, it was helped along by a rap revolution that had primed a new generation for spoken word.

A graduate herself of poetry nights at the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe and the Public Theater, Bryant has become one of the movement's most popular figures, and a cult name in the jazz-funk scene. Her second album, Wishing From The Top, looks set to carry her much further. It was the black American poetry tradition, and the work of Ntozake Shange in particular, that led her to abandon a short career singing jazz. Her poetry's own relationship with the music that accompanies it is natural but different. Dramatic monologue rather than rap, but intoned in a rich and lively style, her verse rides across the beat, using funk and jazz to build atmosphere and fill pauses.Like Maya Angelou, she appears gifted with the ability to communicate the black female experience to just about anybody, and her best lines almost vibrate with energy, begging you to hit the rewind button to hear them again.

From "Heat", a brilliant, eroticised mock-reminiscence of old ladies sweating demurely at a Southern Baptist church meeting ("she can tolerate extreme heat, welcome it even, surrender herself coyly to it, and only seem to sweat where her breasts try to meet") to her touching, candid love poem "Bone Simple" ("I will smooth sweet honey on your temples, wid sticky fingers, making sure I'm extra gentle, 'cause, baby, I love you"), this is subtle, enchanting writing. "Heavy Mellow" is an extraordinary, deeply funky, bass-heavy and humorous catalogue of climes contrary to the code of womanhood: "If my ears fill with wax the minute you whisper you love no other; if I speak too obtusely splattering my food as my friends stare on wonderingly.. it does not follow ... that I am less of a Woman when I'm enjoying more of me.""I worked once in a clothing store, and it was a very chic sort of store, so we had a parade of what I considered gorgeous women coming in," she says "These women were perfection personified, and then some They had the faces, the hair, the boobs, aerobicised asses. They were long-limbed strippers, but still talking about that invisible little bit of cellulite.