Starring L.A Weekly and NAACP Award-winner Diarra Kilpatrick (In the Red and Brown Water at the Fountain, The Royale at Kirk Douglas), Simone Missick (the road weeps the well runs dry at LATC, In the Red and Brown Water), Brent Jennings (Slaughter City at Son of Semele, Joe Turner's Come and Gone at Berkeley Rep), Ted Mattison (Chicago Conspiracy Trial at the Odyssey) and Adam Meir (UK tour of The Pillowman), Closely Related Keys examines the walls we erect in our current climate of racial, religious, moral and political polarization.
Julia Dolan (Kilpatrick) is an up-and-coming corporate attorney whose carefully constructed life begins to crumble when she learns she has a half-sister (Missick) - a Muslim who has fled Iraq. Neyla plays the violin and wants to audition for Julliard - but is there more to her story? "It's about love and loyalty, secrets and lies, and how the past, never being dead, just hovers around waiting to smack us upside the head," says Graf. "It's about picking up the broken pieces to imperfectly assemble a new family and future." The play's title is taken from a musical expression meaning "to share many common tones." "What I love about this piece is that it puts a fresh spin on racial relations that's very different from what we usually see in plays about the African American experience," says Finney. "Each of the five characters has a unique voice with a very distinctive point of view. These people, like all of us, are trying to navigate a world that has become interconnected and multicultural on every level."Videos