Category: blog

Looking forward to developing my play GODSPEED at the Colorado New Play Summit next year! Read the full announcement here.

Excited to announce that I’ve been commissioned to create a new play for The Alcove at the Lortel, a new play development program. I’ll be working on THE REVOLUTIONARY’S SON with dramaturg Arminda Thomas. More info here.

Images from THE HOUSE OF THE NEGRO INSANE at the Contemporary American Theater Festival and the National Black Theater Festival.

I’m still all up in my head after landing back in LA after a whirlwind opening weekend at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. It was surreal to see the play and the characters that have been knocking around my brain for so many years brought to life. Mostly I can’t stop thinking about all the incredible artists who have invested so much of their talent and energy into this project:

CAST

Attius
JEFFERSON A. RUSSELL
Henry
CHRISTOPHER HALLADAY
Effie
CG
Madeleine
LENIQUE VINCENT

PRODUCTION TEAM

Director
CHERYL LYNN BRUCE
Scenic Design
CLAIRE DELISO
Costume Design
JERRY JOHNSON
Lighting Design
JOHN D. ALEXANDER
Sound Design
SHARATH PATEL
Stage Manager
JOHN KEITH HALL
Casting
PAT MCCORKLE, CSA
Iintimacy Coordinator
CARA RAWLINGS
Fight Director
AARON ANDERSON
Dramaturg
THERESA M. DAVIS

Hard to believe that after a two-year pause, THE HOUSE OF THE NEGRO INSANE will finally make it to stage in 2022! First up at the Contemporary American Theater Festival July 8 – 31, then at the National Black Theater Festival August 1 – 6. I’m truly grateful and thrilled to see the amazing cast (Jefferson A. Russell, Christopher Halladay, CG, Lenique Vincent), visionary director (Cheryl Lynn Bruce) and talented designers and crew bring this play to life — a project I began writing over six years ago.

I wrote a piece for the March/April issue of the Dramatist. The whole issue focuses on the ways theatermakers kept the art alive during the pandemic, and I wrote about what it was like to experience a crowd listening to an audiocast of my play. Excerpt below, full article here.

It was a warm July night in a parking lot in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Multicolored lights from dozens of LED headphones glittered in the darkness. It looked like a silent rave from the distance, minus a DJ on the 1s and 2s.

The crowd had come out and donned headphones to listen to the audiocast of my play The House of the Negro Insane, produced by the Contemporary American Theater Festival. While the pandemic was still raging and most theatres were still shuttered, CATF persevered, finding innovative ways to bring stories to the people.

To echo August Wilson, an audience is a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. That sense of community was the biggest piece I missed in most pandemic theatre experiments. Watching Zoom readings and streamed performances on my laptop didn’t come close to delivering the excitement I feel when artists and audiences experience a story, in-the-moment, communally.

Sharing a few shots of the cast (William Oliver Watkins, Christopher Hallady, Candace Grace, Tabatha Gayle) and audio wizards at Dubway Studios in NYC putting in work recording THE HOUSE OF THE NEGRO INSANE audio play.

THE HOUSE OF THE NEGRO INSANE audio play drops July 30th!

I briefly appeared alongside other playwright alums from the Bay Area Playwright Festival for a livestream fundraiser yesterday (recorded my bit in front of some of my favorite Jingletown street art). You can still donate to the Playwrights Foundation as they continue to find new ways to support playwrights and our work. Check out the show (featuring Ari Afsar, Lauren Gunderson, Octavio Solis and Reggie D. White) here.

Tomorrow the North Carolina Black Repertory Company, producers of the National Black Theatre Festival, will perform a reading of THE HOUSE OF THE NEGRO INSANE at the the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston Salem, NC.

The reading will be performed outside, and the audience limited to 50 to follow social distancing guidelines. Since it sold out, the producers will be livestreaming the reading on Facebook: you can tune in at this link on Sunday, September 27 at noon PST (the video will not be available afterward).

If you missed any of CATF‘s UNMUTED series of “Making of…” and Playwright Interviews when they streamed live in July, you can catch them from Sept 11 to Sept 13 on demand. Tons of great content featuring all the playwrights (including me) and sneak peeks at the incredible plays that will premiere in Shepherdstown in 2021. Register for the encore weekend here.