Frank Silvera Writers' Workshop Presents Reading Of PARABLE OF THE BACKYARD ROOTS Featuring Lizan Mitchell

Broadway, film and television actress Lizan Mitchell, a Drama Desk Award nominee for The Trojan Women, has joined the cast of the staged reading of Tylie Shider's Parable of the Backyard Roots. The reading is an installment in the Frank Silvera Writers' Workshop monthly play reading series in partnership with The Billie Holiday Theatre, and will be held at The Billie on Monday, December 10 at 7 pm.

The Frank Silvera Writers' Workshop runs from September through June with play readings once per month as part of the Workshop's residency at RestorationART at The Billie Holiday Theatre.

The reading will be directed by award winning producer, playwright, actor and director Kevin R. Free. The cast is completed by Jarvis Tomdio, Rondel Kennerson and Cherrye J. Davis. A talkback with the playwright and cast will follow.

Described as a "hallucinogenic play," Parable of the Backyard Roots centers on a fictional college professor of English, Bro. MoreCourage (Jarvis Tomdio) who has been promoted to Department Chair at a prestigious university. His celebration dinner is attended by characters from fiction and history who offer a perspective on the intersection between success and tragedy. Bro. MoreCourage, like his unsung dinner guests, suffers loss to achieve upward mobility. But to maintain his security, he chooses to adopt the traits of an oppressive system that his guests confront.

According to playwright Shider - a recent graduate of NYU's Tisch School of The Arts and Delaware State University where he won the school's Drama Desk Award, "Parable is one of three plays I wrote on grief, all of which were written at different times in my graduate career. The plays are not technically a trilogy but do come from a place of grief in my life. My decision to discontinue a teaching contract and attend Tisch coincided with the untimely murder of my cousin, and my work has since been gripped by loss. The plays are indeed elegiac 'plays on grief' - plays that interrogate mortality and create space for 'vexed ghosts' who want to reverse their fates."

Lizan Mitchell portrays one of the guests of Bro. MoreCourage, with Davis and Kennerson rounding out the ensemble.

Ms. Mitchell is an award winning actress who has appeared onstage nationwide in some of the American theatre's most acclaimed literary works including A Raisin in the Sun, For Colored Girls and Dominique Morisseau's Skeleton Crew. She appeared on Broadway in Emily Mann's Having Our Say and played the leading role of Carrie Watts in the first ever African American production of Horton Foote's award winning The Trip To Bountiful at the Cleveland Playhouse. Her film credits include Detroit, The Human Stain and The Preacher's Wife and she has also appeared on numerous television series including Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Law and Order, The Good Wife and The Wire.

The Billie Holiday Theatre at RestorationART is located at 1368 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, New York, 11216. Admission to the reading is Free.

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