New Brooklyn Theatre has dedicated its 2015 season to the past, present, and future of African-American women playwrights. In 2014, the company staged a series of readings of historic but neglected African-American plays from the 1850s to the 1930s with the promise that audiences would help the company select one for a full production. In 2015, the company will fulfill that promise by producing audience favorite Rachel by Angelina Weld Grimké.
Reflecting on the coming centennial of Rachel, the first play by an African-American woman ever to be staged, the company decided to mark the occasion by devoting its entire season to plays by black women.
Jonathan Solari, the company's artistic director, said: "The American theatrical canon has been like a locked box with the keys given out to too narrow a range of writers. Our company has always used theatre to provoke conversation. Now we're turning the conversation back onto the American theatre." Jeff Strabone, the company's chairman of the board, added, "Black playwrights, past and present, remain under-produced. We want to be one of the companies trying to correct that longstanding imbalance."
Rachel (1916) was commissioned by the NAACP as a response to D. W. Griffith's racist feature film The Birth of a Nation. Directed by Courtney Harge, Grimké's powerful play takes us inside the home of a family attempting to cope with the aftermath of the lynching of a father and son. In a year when the streets ring with chants of "Black Lives Matter," Rachel asks us to feel the quiet pain of a young black woman who doubts whether she can bear to bring more lives into a violent world.
The second production of the season will be the NYC premiere of Las Meninas by
Lynn Nottage, the Brooklyn-based recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Pulitzer Prize. Directed by
Jonathan Solari, Las Meninas tells the story of the love affair between Louis XIV's wife Queen Marie-Thérèse and Nabo, her African servant through the imagination of their illegitimate daughter.
Despite being written nearly a century apart, Rachel and Las Meninas explore repressed histories and the fear of bringing children into unjust societies. Both plays will run in repertory for four weeks beginning Monday, August 3 at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Beginning in late September, the company will mount The Second Century, a festival of new plays by ten emerging or early-career African-American women playwrights. New York City is the theatrical capital of the English-speaking world, yet no African-American playwright had work produced on Broadway last year. New, important plays are being written but, instead of reaching an audience, they sit mutely in the drawers of deferred dreams. A city that boasts of its diversity is being let down by its theatres. The Second Century, named to mark Rachel's centennial, aims to bring attention to this ongoing problem. Each reading will be performed in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
All performances will be followed by post-show talkback discussions between the audience, the cast, and invited leaders from government, activism, the arts, and the academy. Full cast and creative teams will be announced shortly.
In keeping with the company's history and mission, all shows will be free to the public. Advance tickets will be available to members, with tickets available to the general public June 1. For more information visit:
www.newbrooklyntheatre.com.
Las Meninas is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn
Arts Council (BAC). Additional support for Las Meninas is made possible with public funds from the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, administered in Kings County by Brooklyn
Arts Council.
Both productions are supported by a generous subsidy from the Irondale Center.
