Feb 4 and 5 at 7pm!
Join The Black Box Project for Cycle 2: FEMME, our second presentation of semi-staged readings by emerging Black playwrights! After an incredibly warm welcome at the Tank, were excited to come back bigger and better in their 98-seat theater with two back-to-back nights of 3 plays by Black & BlaQueer femmes! This cycle will feature A Dying Breed by Ianne Fields Stewart, SIX LEFT FEET by Kayla Stokes, and Like Hyacinth Flowers by Kaia Angelica Lyons. Each night includes a facilitated talkback of the pieces, a bar featuring specialty cocktails all under $5, and a dance party to close the night out!
The Project:
With a love for Black people in everything we do, the Black Box Project is an accessible platform for emerging Black playwrights to develop new work and provide quality, culturally relevant theatre to the Black community. We seek to ensure the growth and vitality of theatre by Black dramatists for generations to come.
The Schedule:
Feb 4, 7pm:
A Dying Breed
8:30 Intermission
Six Left Feet
Facilitated Community Talkback
Mixer
Feb 5, 7pm:
A Dying Breed
8:30 Intermission
Like Hyacinth Flowers
Facilitated Community Talkback
Mixer
One ticket grants admission to both nights, and audience members are welcome to arrive during the intermission on either night to avoid seeing our opening show twice.
The Plays:
A Dying Breed, by Ianne Fields Stewart
Directed by Tabatha Gayle
Featuring William Sinclair Moore, Aleigha Spinks, Michelle Kay Smith, James Jelkin, and Denise Hughes
A DYING BREED offers a chilling glimpse into a not-too-distant authoritarian future. Five unlikely characters are thrown together in an attempt to find shelter, survival, and hope in a world closing in on them. A DYING BREED dynamically explores the nature of family and power in a world of extremes-- asking what each of us might do to survive.
Six Left Feet, by Kayla Stokes
Directed by Aridy Nox
Featuring Camille Upshaw and Kyla Sylvers
SIX LEFT FEET is a devised piece using verbatim text as well as music and a mirage of media and interviews from the playwright's mother and grandmother, peering into and finding parallels between each of their lives at age 20 in their respective time periods in American history. In the words of the playwright, "they would say that their lives arent worthy of being onstage, but that reasoning is just why I have to show them theyre wrong."
Like Hyacinth Flowers, by Kaia Lyons
Directed by Dominique J. Rider
Featuring Hunter Dunn, Gina Crandell, Geoff Can Wyck, and Christen Deckie
Moving between a Pennsylvania flower shop, an abandoned community garden, the sky, and all the space between, Like Hyacinth Flowers finds four divine beings struggling to maintain harmony with their powers. While Iphigenia works to control the everlasting spring and Hestia tries to reconcile her fourteen-year-old consciousness with her thousand-year-old one, Persephone finds herself falling for a man, Hades, who soon reveals himself to be abusive. As his violence causes her to lose her plant-growing abilities, she must find her power in order to regain them.
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