ROCK PAPER SCISSORS Comes to the Atlas Performing Arts Center in June

The Welders Playwrights’ Collective and Soul Shine Theater Garden present the premiere of Rock Paper Scissors, from Thursday, June 22, to Sunday, June 25, at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street NE, Washington, DC. Created and performed by Sisi Reid, and directed by Bryanda Minix, Rock Paper Scissors questions, interrogates, and explores Sisi’s intersecting identities as a Black Queer-Bisexual Woman. In her story of remembering, she weaves movement, poetry, and play together to embody the joy, beauty, curiosity, liberation; internalized competition, invisibility, hypervisibility, and oppressions she lives with as a Black Queer Woman. Accompanied by immersive play spaces and community gatherings, Rock Paper Scissors is an active invitation to return to play as a pathway for healing. 

Of the project Reid shared about the challenges and triumphs of producing a solo show: “I continually receive reminders by my community how incredible of an accomplishment this is. I am doing it and I’ve already won.”

Rock Paper Scissors was first conceived as a 10-minute play as part of The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center's Next Now Fest Alumni Commissioning Project in 2016 at Reid’s alma mater, the University of Maryland College Park. In 2018, while participating in an exchange program with the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Program (PCAP), Santa Catarina State University (UDESC), and the University of Rio de Janeiro, Reid workshopped and performed the solo play in Florianopolis at UDESC and at Cia PeQuod, a theater led by Professor Miguel Vellinho of the University of Rio de Janeiro. The process included opportunities for talkback and Q&A with a public audience that further informed later incarnations of the project.

In the fall of 2022, Reid was selected to develop Rock Paper Scissors at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of the Social Impacts Local Theater Residency program. Here, Reid enlisted a phenomenal development team including director Paige Hernandez, assistant director Bryanda Minix, creative consultant Cat Frost, and Dramaturg Leticia Ridley, with Q&A facilitation led by MK Abadoo. 

In December of 2022, Reid was announced as a 2022 recipient of the MAP Fund which will support the June 2023 production of Rock Paper Scissors. The MAP Fund is supported by the Doric Duke Charitable Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and Mellon Foundation.

Rock Paper Scissors’ creative team also includes director Bryanda Minix, dramaturg Leticia Ridley, creative consultants Paige Hernandez and Cat Frost, production manager Brandon Rashad Butts, lighting designer John D. Alexander, sound designer Thom J. Woodward, and projection designer Nitsan Scharf.

With a few weeks to go to opening night, Reid exclaimed, “This play is me celebrating my healing. Come join us.” 

Event Details

Rock Paper Scissors 

Created and Performed by Sisi Reid

Students and Youth - $15

General Admission - $25

Atlas Performing Arts Center Lab II

1333 H Street NE

Preview - Thursday, June 22, at 8pm

Opening Night - Friday, June 23, at 8pm

Saturday, June 24, 2023, at 8pm

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