Theater Alliance Announces 16th Season

Theater Alliance's 16th Season tackles the pressing issues of our American moment - gun violence, the bitter battles around identity politics, and a patriarchal system that simultaneously benefits from and undervalues the contributions of women. These essential conversations will gain further exploration through the company's annual Word Becomes Action Festival and Hothouse Play Development Series.

Building on the company's mission to develop, produce, and present socially-conscious, thought-provoking work that engages our community in active dialogue, Theater Alliance's 2018-2019 season is excited to bring productions to Washington, DC which illuminate often unseen perspectives on these issues. Conversations between artists and audiences after each performance will encourage additional perspectives and discussion.

Theater Alliance's work has been regularly recognized for its artistic excellence, including four Helen Hayes Awards for Outstanding Production in the past five years (Black Nativity in 2015, The Wonderful World of Dissocia in 2015, Word Becomes Flesh in 2017, and Still Life with Rocket in 2018). In 2017, previous Theater Alliance productions Occupied Territories and Word Becomes Flesh went on to enjoy continued life through special engagements in New York and around the DC metro area.

Through its Radical Neighboring initiative, Theater Alliance strives to create a community where everyone feels welcome at the theater. Name Your Own Price tickets are available for every performance, ensuring that anyone who wants to experience the work can do so.

"Theater at its core is about bearing witness to stories," says Colin Hovde, Producing Artistic Director. "It is also an opportunity to redefine who we engage with and how we understand how to take action. We make space in our post-show conversations for audiences to take the experience step further and become conduits for change."

The new season promises numerous stories to compel us toward action. David Grieg's play The Events grapples with a mass shooting survivor's attempts to understand that terrible event and the events that led up to it. Dominique Morriseau's Blood at the Root explores the deep violence that often accompanies any challenge to institutionalized racism, sexism, or sexuality. And the season's final production - Klytmnestra: An Epic Slam Poem - is a world premiere by Dane Figueroa Edidi that remixes classical Greek drama with Yoruba rituals and contemporary forms to illustrate how patriarchal systems have long exploited Black women.

In association with Anacostia Playhouse, Theater Alliance is also co-producing a new devised work by Washington, DC artist Holly Bass. The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company tells the story of three Black women journeying through the Reconstruction-era South under the guise of a traveling Medicine Show. Later, it comes to light that they have traveled from the distant future to bring about an enlightened global future through the healing and liberation of Black people.

For each production, Theater Alliance will identify partner organizations within our community to bridge the dialogue from stage to action.

The new season also features the return of Theater Alliance's Word Becomes Action Festival - a week of multidisciplinary performances, readings, and workshops that will set the stage for the larger arc of the season and illuminate new work. Some of this work may go on to enjoy continued life at Theater Alliance: Last season's festival, for example, featured a reading of Edidi's Klytmnestra.

Theater Alliance's commitment to new plays continues through its Hothouse Play Development Series - which gives local playwrights a chance to respond to the company's season with short works, and fosters the growth and development of new plays over longer periods of time. Currently, Theater Alliance is working with artists including Psalmayene 24 (director of Word Becomes Flesh) on new full-length plays, with production potential in future seasons.

THEATER ALLIANCE SEASON 16: IN DETAIL

Special Event: The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company
by Holly Bass
In collaboration with The Anacostia Playhouse
July 25 - 29, 2018

Three freedwomen travel through the American south in the 1860s with a Medicine Show, but unlike other snake oil salesmen of the day, these mysterious women give away their healing potions in an attempt to cure a dangerous disease that threatens to destroy future generations. A devised work of dance theater, The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company combines vaudeville, sampling culture and time travel to engage the audience in a conversation about what it means to be free and ways we can move towards an equitable and just society.

Word Becomes Action Festival: Flipping the Script
Artists to be Announced
August 30 - Sept 9, 2018

Building on the success of festivals in previous seasons, Theater Alliance kicks off its formal program in Season 16 with works that explore themes from upcoming productions. Word Becomes Action: Flipping the Script brings together performances, readings, and workshops to illuminate divergent perspectives on reproductive rights, gun ownership, intersectionality, and more.

Raymond O. Caldwell, Associate Artistic Director at Theater Alliance, says that the goal of the Word Becomes Action Festival is to "probe the gray areas, the complexities, and the other sides of the stories we are telling. The festival starts conversations that will continue throughout the season."

The Events
by David Greig
Sept 13 - Oct 7, 2018
Directed by Colin Hovde

In the wake of a mass shooting, lone survivor Claire yearns to find the compassion, understanding, and peace she needs to overcome her trauma-but thoughts and visions of the shooter haunt her every step. A timely exploration of violence, obsession, and our desire to fathom the unfathomable, The Events excavates the humanity found even in circumstances of extraordinary evil, examining the actors on both sides of an unimaginable tragedy.

Blood at the Root
by Dominique Morisseau
Feb 27 - March 24, 2019
Directed by Raymond O. Caldwell

When a Black student disrupts the status quo at her high school by occupying space typically reserved for white students, her community erupts in hate speech, violence, and chaos. Inspired by the Jena Six case, which roiled tensions in Louisiana in 2006, Morisseau's play scrutinizes the intrinsic links between justice, bias, and identity. Moving, lyrical, and bold, Blood at the Root probes the complexities of race, individual freedoms, and what justice means when biases have been normalized.

Klytmnestra: An Epic Slam Poem
Written and Performed by Dane Figueroa Edidi
May 19 - June 16, 2019
Directed by Danielle Drakes

A priestess enters a cemetery suffused with the shades and apparitions of black culture. Yet she conjures the spirits of a different sort-Orestes, Iphigenia, and Klytmnestra. This dynamic one-woman slam poem is a saga of strong women, the men who seek to destroy them, and the dangerous extremes this kind of society can reach if left unchecked. Fusing Kabuki, African dance, and Greek myth, Klytmnestra: An Epic Slam Poem is a dynamic retelling of the classic tale written to vindicate a mother slain by her own son's hand.

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Subscriptions are available and may be purchased online at www.theateralliance.com, through the Box Office at 202-241-2539, or by email at info@theateralliance.com. Single tickets will go on sale on August 1, 2017.

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ABOUT THEATER ALLIANCE

Theater Alliance develops, produces, and presents socially conscious, thought-provoking work that fully engages our community in active dialogue. As the resident theater company of the Anacostia Playhouse since 2013, Theater Alliance is proud to produce professional, award-winning work in Anacostia about social and cultural topics. Through our work, Theater Alliance hopes to create an audience laboratory where the myriad perspectives of DC are face-to-face, confronting issues and tackling difficult questions that affect our diverse community.

Locally, Theater Alliance has twice been finalists for the Mayor's Art Award, featured in the Greater Washington Catalogue for Philanthropy, received the Capitol Hill Community Foundation's Keller Award for making significant, ongoing contributions to the life of the community, and awarded the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities' UPSTART Grant for capacity building. Nationally, we have received the American Theatre Wing's National Theater Company Grant as well as became a member of Theatre Communications Group and the National New Play Network. Theater Alliance has received 83 Helen Hayes Award Nominations and 16 Helen Hayes Awards.

www.theateralliance.com

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