Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center Presents OUR TOWN LA
The production serves as a prelude to UCLA’s recent Beloved Community Initiative Awareness Week.
By: Stephi Wild
Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center, in collaboration with the UCLA Beloved Community Initiative and the UCLA Department of Film, Theater and Television, presented a staged play reading of Thornton Wilder's 1938 Broadway hit and Pulitzer Prize winner "Our Town" - renamed "Our Town LA" for the occasion -- as a prelude to UCLA's recent Beloved Community Initiative Awareness Week.
The staged play reading was directed by Ted Lange, executive produced by ICCC board member Ernest Dillihay and co-produced by ICCC board member Carmen Hayward-Stetson, who also played the narrator. Levy Lee played The Stage Manager and Art Evans was Mr. Webb. The remainder of the intergenerational cast was drawn from UCLA Film, Theater and Television students and professionals from the Los Angeles theater community. Rocky Rood was production stage manager and Will Mahood was the sound designer / editor.
"Our Town" is a particularly significant component of ICCC's cultural legacy. The 1968 Inner City production, conceived and directed by the late ICCC co-founder and UCLA alumnus C. Bernard Jackson, was the first anywhere to feature a multi-ethnic cast, in keeping with ICCC's foundational principle of colorblind casting. The New York Times review of that production was headlined "Our Town is integrated in Los Angeles."
Founded in 1967 in the aftermath of the Watts Riots, Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center is the nation's first minority owned and operated multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-disciplinary visual and performing arts institution, and has been a trailblazer in multicultural arts programming since its founding.
ICCC is now in the second year of a formal collaboration with UCLA, where its founding was first conceived and where many of its artists over the years pursued their undergraduate and graduate studies before launching their careers at ICCC. For more information, see http://www.innercityculturalcenter.org.
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