World Premiere Of TEA Artistry's BEING CHAKA Opens Tonight

New Ohio Theatre and IRT Theater's Archive Residency world premiere of TÉA Artistry's BEING CHAKA opens tonight, and runs through May 27, 2023 in a limited engagement at New Ohio Theatre (154 Christopher St.) in New York City.

BEING CHAKA is developed by Chuk Obasi, Vieve Radha Price, Tara Amber, Nalini Sharma and Talya Mar, written by Tara Amber, Chuk Obasi and Nalini Sharma, and directed by Vieve Radha Price and Chuk Obasi.

BEING CHAKA is a coming-of-age story in which souls from two worlds struggle for self and group transcendence as they take the painful and possible redemptive journey through relationships and systems steeped in racism.

TÉA Artistry states, "Being Chaka is the culmination of TÉA Artistry's multi-year exploration into how Americans apprehend the construct of race in our lives and how this affects the way we treat each other and the decisions we make. The play brings real-life inspired characters to the stage and invites audience members to experience the inner conscious dramas of these characters as they struggle to make friends, become their authentic selves, and transcend the racial constraints of their past histories and present lives."

The cast includes Tara Amber, Joey Brenneman, Colin DePaula, Annie Hartkemeyer, LaWanda Hopkins, Jae Jackson, Joy Kelly, Amanda Marikar, Chuck Montgomery, Kahiem Rivera and Miriam Tabb.

The production team includes Myra G. Reavis (Scenic Design), Nora Marlow Smith (Set Design & Costume consultant), and Leslie Huynh and Ricky Brown (Production Stage Managers).

Tickets are $25 and $20 for students and seniors. Schedule varies - for exact days and times, and to purchase tickets, visit https://newohiotheatre.org.

TÉA Artistry is an experimental theatre initiative that creates and performs at the nexus of social justice, aesthetic discovery, and self-transcendence. By "experimental" they mean that TÉA artists are as dedicated to discovering how theatrical performance pieces can help improve the world as they are to achieving excellence in the theatrical pieces they create.

Over the past twelve years, TÉA Artists have devised eight original performance pieces treating some of the major pressure points in American culture: Muslim - non-Muslim relations post 9/11, community-police encounters in the context of retaliatory gun violence, veteran-civilian dynamics in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the personal and social dilemmas of polarized consciousness, and most recently, the inner conscious dynamics of race in America.