A BREATH FOR US Opens Tiny Dynamite's Socially-Distanced Season

Tiny Dynamite, Philadelphia's home of the beloved theater series A Play, a Pie, and a Pint, is thrilled to announce that we have pivoted to socially-distanced content with a season of A Play, a Pie, and a Pint "In Place." The all-original season begins with the world premiere of A Breath for Us, a play-by-mail conceived by playwright Jarrett McCreary and designer Sara Outing.

A Breath for Us is a unique storytelling experience for this moment, told through six packages sent to audiences in the mail. Set in an alternative timeline, A Breath for Us unfolds the relationship of two young Black women, Josie and Ruthy, during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s. Part alternate history, part love story and, throughout, a celebration of Black joy in tumultuous times, A Breath for Us is a deeply moving experience that invites you to get lost in its world.

Over the course of six mailed packages, audiences are invited into Ruth's world as she becomes a key figure in establishing Kimunmoto, a free Black nation-state within the United States. In each of these packages, there is a letter written by McCreary and hand-fabricated by Outing to Ruth's best friend Josie, as well as artifacts from the world in which Ruth is writing: literature from the Hundred and One, buttons with activist slogans, newspaper clippings, trinkets from Ruth and Josie's childhood, and decoders that reveal secret messages.

In June 2020, Tiny Dynamite commissioned Outing to create work in response to the pandemic and to the urgency of the summer's Black Lives Matter protests. Tiny Dynamite's objective was threefold: to respond to this unprecedented historical moment, to create income and creative opportunities for artists who excite us, and to experiment with new artistic forms and collaborative structures. The company was interested in decentralizing the director in theatrical world-building; what would be the result, they wondered, if they empowered a designer to take the lead in envisioning a theater piece?

Tiny Dynamite asked Outing, a longtime collaborator, to create objects that expressed her artistic impulses of the moment. Sara created objects from an alternate timeline she imagined for Black Americans, one in which Fred Hampton, one of the most famous leaders of the Black Panthers, was not assassinated by police in 1969. Over the summer, Sara had conversations with Philadelphia playwrights and chose Jarrett McCreary to respond to her objects with text. Their shared creation, A Breath for Us, is a play-by-mail - a story told in six packages of letters and mementos between two young Black women, during the tumult of the late 1960s.

"Theatremakers have a chance right now - everyone has a chance - to untether from normalcy," adds Outing. "Despite being confined at home, the internet has expanded our vision. The physical boundaries tying us to a specific venue, or audience, or network of influence, have been nearly erased. We turn instead to the social and moral currents that have always influenced our lives and our work, and that now fully define it. I'm riding that current into whatever comes next."

Its first mailing to 50 participants, beginning at the end of February, immediately SOLD OUT. Given audience demand, Tiny Dynamite has committed to a second mailing, beginning JUNE 2021.

Tickets (starting at $40) are available at tinydynamite.org.