Corkscrew Theater Festival Closes With Johnny G. Lloyd's PATIENCE, July 24-August 3
Corkscrew Theater Festival's third annual summer season concludes with the world premiere of Johnny G. Lloyd's Patience. Directed by Velani Dibba and running July 24-August 3, Patience follows the world's #1 professional solitaire player, a young black man named Daniel, as he struggles to allow other people into his life while fending off an even younger challenger, a teenager named Ella. In tracing the kinship and competition between the two elite players, Patience illustrates a relationship paralleling that of Venus and Serena Williams, exploring questions about excellence, opportunity, and jealousy in a less athletic (though still high-stakes) setting.
Performed by Joshua Gitta as Daniel, Kristin Dodson as Ella, Brenda Crawley as Mother, Christopher Rand as Jordan, and DeAnna Supplee* as Nikita, Patience is the last of four mainstage productions that are part of Corkscrew Theater Festival, which provides early-career artists with a high level of production support.
Though he's been the world's #1 ranked Solitaire player since age 20, Daniel is hung up on another title used to describe him: "the Venus Williams of solitaire." The threat of being eclipsed by a Serena (who just might be the determined up-and-comer Ella) is one of many pressures Daniel carries, alongside his difficulty communicating with his soon-to-be husband, his fraught relationship with his "momager," and the burden of being excellent in a field that only has room for one excellent person at a time. Patience is Johnny G. Lloyd's ingenious portrait of a young black man struggling to build a life with other people when all he's learned so far is how to be alone.
"When I was writing Patience, I was really obsessed with card games, and I wanted to write something that used the card game as a jumping off point to explore so many things that felt universal to me - relationships, work, our relationship with talent," said Lloyd. "And as we explored those things, it became so clear that this was also a play about giving black characters a chance to exist somewhat outside of the confines of the whiteness and straightness of western culture. It became somewhat of a Rorschach test: when you remove explicit mentions race - specifically whiteness - from a play written and created by black bodies, what do audiences implicitly see? And how do we challenge that vision?"
Corkscrew Theater Festival features four world premieres, four workshop productions, and four readings performed in repertory over four weeks. Special attention has been given to theater makers who are developing work through tight-knit collaborations. A majority of the participating artists identify as women, trans, or non-binary.
Performances of Patience will take place July 24-August 3 (see schedule above) at Paradise Factory (64 E 4th St, Manhattan). Critics are welcome as of the 7pm performance on July 25, which serves as the official opening. Tickets are $24 and can be purchased at corkscrewfestival.org or by calling 347.954.9125.
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