Five minutes into Flood City — clearly as part of that play’s idiosyncratic plot — Theater Alliance Artistic Director Colin Hovde interrupted proceedings to announce, among other things, that he would soon reveal the company’s 2018-2019 season. Although it’s doubtful that Flood City required that the season be announced on June 21, it was, and it’s a deep and serious one. It contains stories about race, gender and gun violence, including an original piece by poet, novelist and actor Dane Figueroa Edidi. It will be supplemented with a devised piece by local artist Holly Bass and a festival, the details of which are not yet available.
The Theater Alliance regular season begins with David Greig’s The Events, in which a multi-racial and -ethnic choir is mercilessly slaughtered — except for one person — by a young racist. The Events, however, is about what happens to the survivor; how her search for meaning struggles with a quest for vengeance. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley called The Events “a solemn, searching and ultimately very moving play about a faith-shattering act of violence” and a “gutsy work” with a “sharp and provocative calculation.” Hovde will direct; the play will run from September 13 to October 7, 2018.
An African-American high school girl sits under a tree where the white kids usually congregate; the next day three nooses appear on the tree. Are we in 1958 Selma, Alabama? Sadly, we are not; we are in 2006 Louisiana, and Dominique Morriseau’s (Skeleton Crew) Blood at the Root (the title taken from Nina Simone’s song about lynching) dissects the evasions, denials, and subsequent violence which spring from this fierce act of “Strange Fruit”hatred. The play, based on the actual Jena Six case, is larded with surprises: people act in unexpected ways because the racial assumptions are so subterranean. Isabella Fraser of the Edinburgh Spotlight called it “an exquisite play which addresses prejudice” and David Barbour of Lighting & Sound says Morriseau “lays bare the complex interactions between the interlocking prejudices and grievances that prevent real social progress from taking place. ” From February 27 to March 24, 2019; Raymond O. Caldwell will direct.
The multi-talented Edidi will take the stage with her epic one-actor piece Klymnestra: An Epic Poem Slam. In Greek mythology Clytemnestra killed her husband Agamemnon after he had tricked her into sending their daughter to him to be sacrificed, and then is killed in turn by her son Orestes, but it is not clear what role this story will play, if any, in Edidi’s work. The company promises it will be “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.” Danielle Drakes will direct. The play runs from May 19 to June 16 of next year.
But wait! There’s more coming this summer.
This summer, Theater Alliance, in collaboration with the Anacostia Playhouse, will present Holly Bass’s devised dance theater piece, The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company between July 25 and 28. Three freed women travel through the American South dispensing medicine which will help cure future generations, for free. Theater Alliance promises that it will “combine 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.”
Between August 30 and September 19 of this year, Theater Alliance will host its “Word Becomes Action: Flipping the Script” festival, which it says will “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.” Theater Alliance has not yet announced which artists will be presenting work in this festival, or what the work will be.
You can buy season tickets to the upcoming Theater Alliance season by clicking here.
