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Theater Alliance Presents THE BLACKEST BATTLE Beginning This Month

The Blackest Battle premieres on July 31, 2021 and will be available for scheduled online streams through the month of August. 

Theater Alliance Presents THE BLACKEST BATTLE Beginning This Month

As the final digital film of the theater season, Theater Alliance presents a world premiere production of acclaimed artist Psalmayene 24‘s The Blackest Battle. A love story that calls attention to Black-on-Black gun violence, the film is set in the future, when reparations have been made and youth get high on a drug called Hope.

With songs composed by Nick tha 1da and visual art from Wesley Clark, Camilla King, Maliah Stokes, and Rodney “Buck” Herring, the film is half music video, half graphic-novel-come-to-life, and utterly unlike any other work of digital theater that has come out of the past year.

“Working with Psalmayene 24 on this commission has been a tremendous gift,” says Raymond O. Caldwell, who directed the film. “Theater Alliance committed to this play four years ago – we knew then that it would be a powerful, dynamic, and significant work of theater, and it has become even stronger with every draft. Theater Alliance is proud to support and produce local playwrights like Psalm.”

The Blackest Battle was commissioned from Psalmayene 24 and Nick tha 1da in 2017. In the years since, it has been written, developed, workshopped, and revised through Theater Alliance’s Hothouse New Play Development program – with performances at the John F. Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage Festival, as well as the Word Becomes Action Festival. Originally slated for live performance in summer of 2020, the production has been reimagined for the screen.

“Our digital production team has grown in leaps and bounds over this season’s work,” says Caldwell. “It is thrilling to bring this film to audiences, knowing we are at the forefront of innovative storytelling – pushing the boundaries of what theater is and can do.”

The Blackest Battle premieres on July 31, 2021 and will be available for scheduled online streams through the month of August.

Under the guidance and expertise of photography director Kelly Colburn, as well as art director Jonathan Dahm Robertson, Theater Alliance has again recreated the intimate theatrical nature of its work for the camera. The production has been pre-recorded, utilizing stringent safety precautions.

This production is made possible through the support of the National Foundation for the Arts, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the Revada Foundation, and the Arts Forward Fund. Season 18 at Theater Alliance is generously sponsored by David and Jean Heilman Grier.

Purchase tickets at www.theateralliance.com or call 202-241-2539.

Full article by Stephi Wild for BroadwayWorld D.C. available here.

Dramaworks to Premiere THE DURATION by Bruce Graham

[Dramaworks] announced Wednesday another world premiere, the American playwright and educator Bruce Graham’s The Duration. 

Playwright Bruce Graham, whose "The Duration" will have its world premiere Feb. 5 at Palm Beach Dramaworks.
Playwright Bruce Graham

The play, which is about a young woman who goes on weekly hikes to a remote cabin to try to unravel the mystery of her historian mother’s abrupt disappearance, received a reading in March at Dramaworks, and was so well-received that the company has decided to mount a full staging.

“We’re delighted to have the opportunity to produce the world premiere of ‘The Duration,’ which created a lot of excitement when we presented the reading,” Hayes said.

The Duration opens Feb. 4. 

Read the full article from the Palm Beach Daily News here.

Melisa Tien’s SWELL to Premiere Online at HERE

Created by 26 artist-collaborators, Swell weaves together ten original, new music compositions by ten composers.

Melisa Tien

Playwright, lyricist, and librettist Melisa Tien is the creator and producer of the upcoming live, online song cycle Swell, presented by HERE from March 17-21, 2021. This contemporary work about immigrants and children of immigrants, written by immigrants and children of immigrants, is directed by Elena Araoz with music direction by Tian Hui Ng.

“Right now, the U.S. feels like it’s on the brink of so many things – politically, economically, socially. Immigrant stories, especially ones that humanize the people they’re about, help highlight those who are often left behind when, for example, a medical disaster happens. Swell reminds us these are real people, simply trying to make their way, like everyone else,” Melisa said of the piece’s subject and timeliness.

Swell features the work of composers and lyricists Joshua Cerdenia, Carolyn Chen, Justine F. Chen, Or Matias, Tamar Muskal, Polina Nazaykinskaya, Leyna Marika Papach, Izzi Ramkisson, Kamala Sankaram, Jorge Sosa, Stavit Allweis, Konstantin Soukhovetski, and Melisa Tien, who draw from their personal histories and cultures. Hailing from Mexico, India, Israel, Japan, Trinidad, the Philippines, Russia, and Taiwan, the composers’ unique, surprising, and deeply human stories are expressed through voice, piano, cello, and violin.

Performers include mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, soprano Mimi Hilaire, tenor Alok Kumar, and baritone Ricardo Rivera. Instrumentalists include members of the Victory Players Nathan Ben-Yehuda, Clare Monfredo, and Elly Toyoda. Additional collaborators are Video Designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, Audio Engineer Jon Robertson, Video Engineer Kris Kirkwood, Production Stage Manager Neelam Vaswani, and Assistant Stage Manager Alyssa K. Howard.

As an online presentation, Swell is building upon the wealth of knowledge that has accumulated over the past year in live, online productions. It will feature singers singing together remotely, and aims to incorporate accessibility for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, through captioning, an interpreter, and a new application that conveys music in a dynamic visual format.

Melisa summarizes the origins of the piece: “The seed for Swell started when I attended a new music festival a few years ago and was struck by a piece of Nathalie Joachim’s. It was tied to her home country of Haiti and I recall being so moved by it, partly because it put me in mind of Taiwan, where my own family is from. I started to wonder where the other U.S.-based new music writers were, who came from outside the U.S. I couldn’t think of any, yet I was convinced there had to be new music writers out there who identified as immigrants, or children of immigrants, who had stories to tell, and I wanted to hear them.”

Half of the program will be presented on Wednesday, March 17 at 8pm ET, and the second half will be presented on Thursday, March 18 at 8pm ET. The full program will stream on Friday and Saturday, March 19-20, at 8pm ET, and on Sunday, March 21 at 6pm ET. Audiences can purchase a sliding-scale ticket ($5-50) and will receive details for a password-protected video on HERE’s website.

Melisa Tien is a playwright, lyricist, librettist, producer, and educator. She is the author of the plays Untitled Landscape, Best Life, The Boyd Show, Yellow Card Red Card, and Familium Vulgare, co-author of the music-theater works Swell, Daylight Saving, and Mary, and co-producer of the audio experience/podcast Active Listening. A New Dramatists resident playwright, Melisa is a recipient of a grant from the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre, a commissionee of the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan Project, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting. She teaches experimental theatrical writing at Sarah Lawrence College. BA, UCLA; MFA, Columbia University. www.melisatien.com.

Read the full article from Broadway World here.

‘The Half-Life of Marie Curie’ directed by Dawn Monique Williams Review: Fallout of an Affair

NASMM in Wall Street Journal 08.10.14 - the National ...
Arkansas’s TheatreSqaured offers a well-performed webcast of a play about the Nobel Laureate’s persecution by the French press for her relationship with a married man.
Rebecca Harris as Marie Curie and
Leontyne Mbele-Mbong as Hertha Ayrton

In spite of all the theater-related traveling I did in the years before the pandemic struck, there are still plenty of drama companies of consequence that I have yet to see. I’ve been hearing good things about Arkansas’s TheatreSquared for some time now, and it was long my plan to see a play there after paying a visit to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which is just 30 miles away and which I also have yet to see. But life kept getting in the way, and the coming of Covid-19 finished the job: I haven’t seen a play in a theater, in or out of New York, since March. So when TheatreSquared announced that it  would be webcasting a production of Lauren Gunderson’s “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” taped in an  empty theater, I immediately put it on my schedule. 

Ms. Gunderson’s work is rarely staged in New York, but she was the most frequently produced playwright in America (not counting Shakespeare) in 2017 and 2019, and it’s easy to see why. Not only does she specialize in feminist-angled plots whose protagonists are women, but she makes a special point of writing eminently practical plays that are carefully tailored to the specific needs of theater companies. Like all prolific artists, Ms. Gunderson’s work is uneven—she can be earnest to a fault when she has a political point to make— but at her best, she is a fine craftsman whose shows are always solidly made and on occasion inspired. 

“The Half-Life of Marie Curie,” a two-hander first performed off Broadway in 2019, falls somewhere  in between the extremes of over-earnestness and inspiration. It’s a bioplay that tells how Mme. Curie (Rebecca Harris)—the Polish-French physicist who discovered radium, coined the word “radioactive”  and won two Nobel Prizes, in 1903 and 1911—was persecuted by France’s press when it became known  that she was having a passionate affair with a married man. Hertha Ayrton (Leontyne Mbele-Mbong), a British colleague and part-time suffragette, comes to France to look after her old friend as the action gets under way. Alas, much of the dialogue that ensues amounts to little more than undramatized  pulpit-pounding and ill-digested biographical data (“I’m sorry—you won another Nobel Prize?”) with a  few glaring anachronisms thrown in for good measure (I cannot imagine that a Brit with so well-bred  an accent would have used the word “bullshit” in casual conversation in 1911). Nevertheless, the situation portrayed by Ms. Gunderson has the advantage of being inherently dramatic, and “The Half-Life  of Marie Curie” is the kind of story that can easily take wing so long as the two actors are first-rate. 

Rebecca Harris as Marie Curie

This brings us to Ms. Harris and Ms. Mbele Mbong, both of whom (as theater people like to say) really know how to deliver the mail.  Not only does Ms. Harris bear a striking resemblance to Mme. Curie, but her binational accent is impeccable and her performance is both compelling and entirely believable. So fully does she embody her role that it hardly seems as if she’s acting at all. (Newsreel footage of Mme. Curie exists, and I’d be surprised if Ms. Harris hadn’t screened it while preparing for this show.) 

Ms. Mbele-Mbong is no less convincing, and the production, whose skeletal sets are by Ashleigh Burns and whose sound design is by Michael Prie to, is spare but exceedingly handsome. Dawn Monique Williams, the director, is the associate artistic  director of Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company. Her work is new to me, but if this beautifully staged  show is representative, then I’ll definitely seek it out in the future. 

I also plan to keep an eye on TheatreSquared, which is clearly worthy of its fine reputation. I can’t wait  for the pandemic to subside so that I can resume seeking out first-class theater all over America—especially from outstanding drama companies like TheatreSquared. 

Review by Terry Teachout for the Wall Street Journal.

Black Girl — and Nonbinary — Magic at Helm of Bay Area Theaters, featuring Khalia Davis

Director Khalia Davis works with cast members during a rehearsal for a production of “She Persisted, the Musical” at the Bay Area Children’s Theatre Osher Studio in Berkeley.

Bay Area theater saw the promotion of three new Black female or femme-identified nonbinary leaders in rapid succession this year.

In August, Khalia Davis became the artistic director of Bay Area Children’s Theatre, with Nina Meehan changing titles from executive artistic director to CEO.

Q: Has each of you always seen yourself as a leader?

Khalia Davis: I have not always seen myself in a leadership position in the theater industry. I started out as a kid actor, from 6 years old. I thought I was going to be an actress for the screen. It was not until I was in high school and I booked TheatreWorks Silicon Valley that I thought, “Oh, you can make money being a theater artist.” But the problem was that I was not seeing myself reflected in spaces of leadership. (As my career progressed), I was recognizing that I have a lot of opinions about the theater for a young audience (TYA) industry. I was recognizing that I’m not seeing myself in these spaces, and that I’m not hearing particular things being voiced. That probably means that I need to be that person.

Q: Each of you is so new in your organizations that maybe this isn’t a fair question, but is there something you’ve already done — even if it’s something small or tough to quantify, that you wouldn’t necessarily put on a resume — that you’re proud of?

Davis: Something that I love that we’ve all adopted is this access check-in before all of our meetings, where we focus everybody on: What does everyone need? That could be as simple as, “My Wi-Fi’s spotty today,” to, during some of our darkest times in the last few months, I have been very honest and open about where my head was at, how it was hard for me to think when community members are being gunned down in the streets. I appreciated us having the space every single day before we got into the work to just say, “As a human, how are you?”

Q: What does Kamala Harris as VP mean to each of you?

Davis: It’s so refreshing and gratifying to witness someone who has continually owned both parts of herself in her identity throughout her whole life and who has done the work to learn more about that history so she can speak to those members of the community in a more educated, grounded, respectful way. I also think it’s great to see someone who appreciates and celebrates life. There is a joy that she brought. We have not seen that in four years.

Read the full interview by Lily Janiak from Datebook here.