Pauli Murray's Story to Come to Life On Stage

Fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to stand, Pauli Murray refused to sit in the back of the bus; 20 years before the Greensboro sit-ins, she organized restaurant sit-downs in the nation's capital. Pauli Murray not only lived on the edge of history, she seemingly "pulled it along with her.

Using archival images, three chairs, and a typewriter, Thaddaeus Edwards, Rasool Jahan and Edith Snow bring to life 60 characters, six decades, and two continents in To Buy the Sun: The Challenge of Pauli Murray, an original play by Lynden Harris, exploring the barrier-breaking life of Dr. Murray, an extraordinary mixed-race, gender non-conforming activist, feminist, author, attorney and Episcopal priest.

The play, directed by Kathryn Hunter Williams, opens the evening before Murray celebrates communion at the church where her enslaved grandmother was baptized 123 years before, an event that will be immortalized by CBS' On The Road with Charles Kuralt and watched by millions. As she prepares for the next day, she reflects on old haunts and old friends, from Harlem to Harvard and Eleanor Roosevelt to Betty Friedan, and the purpose of her life as it takes on a new and unexpected shape.

The limited engagement at St. Paul's Chapel, Broadway and Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, begins on Thursday, April 5 at 7 p.m. Additional performances are on Friday, April 6 at 7p.m. and Saturday, April 7 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Seating is general admission. Tickets are $15 and may be purchased in advance at tbtsnyc.eventbrite.com. Tickets also will be available at the door.

Organized by The Pauli Murray Center for History & Social Justice, major sponsors for the spring 2018 tour of To Buy the Sun are Trinity Church Wall Street, the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP (where she was the first African American woman to practice), the Pauli Murray Project at the Duke Human Rights Center/FHI, and Hidden Voices. The next performances will be at the Pauli Murray Center at Yale University from April 12-15.