On the heels of the announcement that their company will receive the John Aniello Award as Washington’s outstanding emerging theater company of the year, Ally Theatre Company has announced a three-play season which promises to, in the words of Managing Director Ivana Alexander, “creat[e] conversations at the intersection of borders and belonging.”
The Ally season opens with a production of Naomi Jackson The War Boys, a one-act play about three young men who patrol the U.S.-Mexican border in the hope of receiving a $10-a-head bounty for the illegal aliens they catch. But the border between fantasy and reality is much more easily penetrated than the geographical border for them. The Chicago Reader’s Carol Burbank called it “a violent and often beautifully written story”. Matt Ripa directs; from August 9-31, 2019.
Ally will follow with a stage adaptation of the journalist Federica Cellini’s screenplay Dhana and the Rosebuds, which traces the experiences of a young Syrian woman, studying in America, who believes that she has seen her estranged grandmother in a TV news clip about Syrian refugees crossing the border between Macedonia and Serbia. Dhana and the Rosebuds will play on November 1-23 of this year; no director has been announced.
Ally will wrap up the season with Joel Drake Johnson’s Rasheeda Speaking. Dr. Williams means to fire Jaclyn, his very efficient African-American secretary, and he commissions the fluttery Ilene, who is White, to gather enough dirt on her to make the case to Human Resources. Williams’ motivations seem suspect — he says she’s rude with patients and doesn’t like him, is angry and condescending and that this behavior is “their” way of self-protection — but when she shows up she is rude to patients and condescending. Johnson’s play is deliberately ambiguous to provoke us to think about the role of race in office politics. New York Times critic Jesse Green, who was at the time writing for Vulture, called it “a wallop of a play.” From March 6-22, 2020; Ally’s Producing Artistic Director Ty Hallmark will direct.
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