TheatreFIRST's Story of Henrietta Lacks Opens Next Month

Coming this May, TheatreFIRST closes its first season of in-house new works with the world premiere of HeLa by Lauren Gunderson and Geetha Reddy, dramaturgy by Lisa Marie Rollins, and directed by Evren Odcikin. HeLa evokes and explores the story of Henrietta Lacks, the African-American woman whose hard life and young death produced the most powerful line of immortal cells the world has ever seen. This lyrical theatrical mash up will explore the science, legacy, tragedy, poetry, and universal truths that one woman's story and biology can offer the world.

HeLa runs May 18th - June 17th, 2017. Opening Night is Monday May 22nd, 2017 at 8pm. Tickets are $20-$35 and available at www.theatrefirst.com.

Lauren M. Gunderson is the most produced living playwright in America of 2016, the winner of the Lanford Wilson Award and the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and John Gassner Award for Playwriting, and a recipient of the Mellon Foundation's 3-Year Residency with Marin Theatre Company. She studied Southern Literature and Drama at Emory University, and Dramatic Writing at NYU's Tisch School where she was a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. Her work has been commissioned, produced and developed at companies across the US including South Cost Rep (Emilie, Silent Sky), The Kennedy Center (The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful And Her Dog!), The O'Neill, The Denver Center, San Francisco Playhouse, Marin Theatre, Synchronicity, Olney Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Shotgun Players, TheatreWorks, Crowded Fire and more. She co-authored Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley with Margot Melcon. Her work is published at Playscripts (I and You, Exit Pursued By A Bear, The Taming, and Toil And Trouble), Dramatists (Silent Sky, Bauer, Miss Bennet) and Samuel French (Emilie).

Geetha Reddy is a five-time recipient of PlayGround's Emerging Playwright Award. Her play Safe House premiered in 2010 at SF Playhouse. At Central Works she and Aaron Loeb collaborated to create Blastosphere! In 2008 Safe House was selected for the Bay Area Playwright's Festival, and Sacramento's Capital Stage's Playwright's Revolution Festival. Geetha's play Me Given You was part of the Playwright's Foundation's In the Rough reading series. She was awarded PlayGround's June Anne Baker Prize in 2005 and has since received three Playground Alumni commissions. Her plays have also appeared in the San Francisco Fringe Festival, the Santa Rosa Quickies festival, and the Best of PlayGround Festival. Geetha is a member of the Dramatist's Guild, Resident Playwright at the Playwright's Foundation and is currently under commission (through the Gerbode Foundation) on an adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities for Shotgun Players.

Dramaturg Lisa Marie Rollins is also a playwright, poet, and theatre director. Most recently she co-directed Young Jean Lee's The Shipment (Crowded Fire Theater) and a reading of Tearrance Chisholm's Br'er Cotton (Playwrights Foundation). She is the director of All Atheists are Muslim by Zahra Noorbakhsh and was co-producer of W. Kamau Bell's "Ending Racism in About and Hour". Lisa Marie performed her acclaimed solo play, Ungrateful Daughter: One Black Girl's Story of Being Adopted by a White Family...That Aren't Celebrities in festivals, universities and academic conferences across the US. She holds graduate degrees from The Claremont Graduate University and UC Berkeley and is a Lecturer at St Mary's College in Performance Studies. /people/Lisa-Marie-Rollins/Lisa Marie is Resident Artist with Crowded Fire Theater and Artist-in-Residence at BRAVA Theater for Women in San Francisco.

Director Evren Odcikin - director of new plays and marketing with Golden Thread Productions - has developed new plays at South Coast Repertory, The Lark, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Kennedy Center, InterACT, NNPN New Play Showcase, Magic Theatre, Aurora Theatre Company, Playwrights Foundation, Cutting Ball Theatre Company, and Crowded Fire Theater. Born and raised in Turkey and a graduate of Princeton University, Evren was a 2015 National Directors Fellow for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, National New Plays Network, the Kennedy Center, and SDCF. Evren was selected as an Emerging Theatre Leader by Theatre Communications Group for the American Express Leadership Bootcamp with Golden Thread Productions Founding Artistic Director Torange Yeghiazarian as his mentor. He was also the recipient of a 2013 TITAN Award for Directors from Theatre Bay Area. He was named a "Person to Watch" by American Theatre Magazine. Evren is an associate member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

The cast of HeLa features Sarah Mitchell, Khary Moye, Akemi Okamura, Richard Pallaziol, Desiree Rodgers and Jeunée Simon. The HeLa creative team includes scenic design by Bailey Hikawa, costume design by Maggie Whitaker, lighting design by Stephanie Anne Johnson, prop design by Devon LaBelle, sound and video design by Kevin Myrick, and stage management by Salim Razawi and Ellen Boener.

What does it mean to create art in the historical present? TheatreFIRST seeks to revolutionize how audiences and artists engage the genre. Now an all in-house development company, our staff, board, artists, creative and production teams follow a mandate of at least two-thirds people of color and at least fifty percent female identified. Making theatre a place where social justice happens means creating the space for an intersection of artist and audience that reflects our progressive world.