BWW Preview: GENESIS FESTIVAL Opens Crossroads Theatre Company

Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick will launch its 2015-16 season with its Genesis Festival from October 2nd to the 4th. It will feature two acclaimed plays by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage and the works of two emerging playwrights presented as staged readings.

Nottage's a Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine and Intimate Apparel, companion works about two black female entrepreneurs set a century apart, will be presented in repertory with the same cast at 3 and 8 p.m., respectively, on Saturday, Oct. 3. Crossroads' presentations will mark the first time the two award-winning plays have been presented together. They are slated to receive full productions at Crossroads during the 2016-17 season. The readings will take place on the Crossroads mainstage.

Christina Anderson's How to Catch Creation, the provocative story of a convict readjusting to the world after spending half his life incarcerated, will be presented at 8 p.m., Friday, Oct. 2.

The festival will close Sunday at 7 p.m. with a staged reading of The Sting of White Roses, by Angelica Chéri, about a couple about to welcome their first child amidst challenging and mysterious circumstances.

Anderson's and Chéri's plays will be staged on the fourth floor of the theater. All the readings will be followed with a reception and audience talkback with the artists.

The four plays provide an introduction to the season's theme of "everyday heroes," according to Producing Artistic Director Marshall Jones III.

"In all of this season's plays, the lead characters are everyday people who either aspire to achieve great things or their circumstances force them to do great things," Jones said. "This is certainly true of the main characters in Ms. Nottage's plays."

In Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, the main character is a successful African-American publicist living in Manhattan who must return to her former life in Brooklyn and deal with her working-class family after her husband takes off with her money. It won an Obie Award in 2005. Intimate Apparel is the story of a black seamstress who makes beautiful lingerie in her boarding house bedroom, while dreaming of making her own trousseau. It grew out of Nottage's own search for information about her great-grandmother, a seamstress who had married an immigrant from Barbados.

Nottage won 2005 Pulitzer Prize drama for Ruined. She also was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005 and won a MacArthur "Genius" Grant in 2007. Her works have been produced widely throughout the U.S. and around the world. Intimate Apparel currently is being adapted as an opera. She is a graduate of Brown University and Yale School of Drama, where she has been on faculty since 2001. She also is an associate professor in the theatre department at the Columbia School of the Arts.

Both Anderson and Chéri are protégés of Nottage. "Through her teaching at Yale and Columbia, Lynn has nurtured a stable of young playwrights, who are poised to make an impact in theater," said Jones.

Crossroads' season will continue with the sixth annual production of Holiday Jubilee, Dec. 11-20. This year's family favorite will feature a celebration of Gospel music. College Colors, by Stacie Lents, a comedy that takes a serious look at racial attitudes on college campuses during both the tumultuous '60s and 21st century, will have its world premiere Feb. 4-14.

Fly, the acclaimed drama about the Tuskegee Airmen, by Ricardo Khan and Trey Ellis, returns to Crossroads April 7-17 for an encore production following its off-Broadway premiere at The New Victory Theater. Directed by Khan, Crossroads' co-founder, the production will be staged first at the Pasadena Playhouse in California before coming east. Fly premiered at Crossroads in 2009 and went on to stages across the country.

Founded in 1978 by Ricardo Khan and L. Kenneth Richardson, Crossroads Theatre Company embraces the vision that African-American theater is intended for a broad-based, diverse audience. As a major force in the development of new ideas and the introduction of formerly marginalized writers, Crossroads produces works that enrich and diversify the representation of African American culture on the American stage.

Tickets for the Genesis Festival are $25 for adults; $5 for students. Purchase online atcrossroadstheatrecompany.org or call 732-545-8100. Crossroads is located at 7 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, N.J. 08901.

Photo Credit: Lynn Nottage, Courtesy of Crossroads Theatre