Conversation with a Kleagle Begins Previews Feb. 6 at Thirteenth Street Repertory Company

This is Thirteenth Street Repertory Company's second production of the Conversation with a Kleagle. Press notes state that "the play is one of the best we produced in our 36 year history and we are proud to include it in "The Best of 13" Festival of Plays."

Winner: 2004 New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest, a contest that seeks socially conscious scripts from around the world.

Based on a true story: at the height of a lynching epidemic in the late 1920's, a black journalist,  passing for white, travels to the deep South to interview a Kleagle, a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan. When his true racial identity is discovered by the Klan he escapes being lynched, only to find that his rescuer's family paid a dear price, a price that brings the journalist back to the south to confront the Kleagle and the Klan.

Rudy Gray won three John Golden Playwriting awards, a Creative Artists Public Service Award for Playwriting, the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest and a Writers Guild of America Screenwriting Fellowship. He was also nominated for an AUDELCO Award for excellence in theatre. Many of his plays have been produced around the country, including Trio by the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, Before The Flood by The AMAS Repertory Theatre, Linty Lucy, and Medea and the Doll at The Frank Silvera Writers Workshop and at The Samuel Beckett Theatre with Morgan Freeman; the latter play was also produced twice at The North Carolina Black Repertory Theatre and the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood with Dick Williams directing and Ella Joyce starring in all three productions, and by The Jubilee Players in Fort Worth, Texas. Currently, Rudy is writing a play about black Germans in the Ruhr Valley during the Third Reich. Rudy, with a Ph.D. in Drama, teaches in the Thematic Studies Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

About Thirteenth Street Repertory Company: Founded in 1972 by Artistic Director Edith O'Hara, 13th Street Repertory has been a place for actors, directors, playwrights, and technicians to develop their craft in a caring, nurturing, professional environment. Anywhere between 5-7 shows run weekly, including children's shows on the weekend. 

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