10 year old Jabari loves to paint. With his Forever President Barack Obama as a guide, Jabari escapes the violent reality of an encounter with the police through his colorful paintings where he meets children from the past who teach him how to be fearless. He then meets his hero, Barack Obama, as a 6 year old boy on the eve of the assassination of MLK, Jr. Will Jabari be able to instill in young Barack the lessons he’s learned and therefore ensure that Barack will have the necessary tools to become president? Will he learn to take these lessons back into his own life and heal his community? JABARI DREAMS OF FREEDOM is a 45 minute dream, a piece for ages 8 and up, using rap, freedom songs, hip hop dance, history, and humor to tell the story of a young Black boy from the South Side of Chicago who is afraid to leave the house, but learns to dream of freedom.
Genre: Drama
Foxes
Foxes follows Daniel, a young black man trying to keep up with his life in London’s Caribbean community while balancing his own goals with his family’s expectations. When his relationship with best friend Leon brings an unexpected change it creates turmoil, bringing a taboo into his family home that has the power to tear the closest and most loving relationships apart. A deeply moving and complex story of family, community, and sexual identity.
Shortlisted for the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award, Dexter Flanders’s debut play Foxes explores masculinity and identity within London’s Caribbean community and Black street culture.
How To Steal A Picasso
A comic-drama set against the bankruptcy of the Motor City. The Smith family doesn’t agree on much, but when their son Johnny comes home for the first time in four years, they reluctantly reconvene to celebrate the father (a failed painter) winning the Yoko Ono Lifetime Achievement Award for Non-Objective Art. In fact, tonight, Sean (the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono) is to come to their house and give the father the award personally. But when a Picasso goes missing from the nearby Detroit Institute for the Arts, the family is suspected and Johnny’s homecoming takes a dramatic turn.
Les Deux Noirs
Set in the legendary Parisian café Les Deux Magots in 1953, LES DEUX NOIRS reimagines the meeting between Native Son author Richard Wright and essayist/activist James Baldwin. It explores the tension between Baldwin’s searing critiques of Native Son and Wright’s unbridled indignation in response—a confrontation between two mighty African-American artists, with echoes of a present-day rap battle.
The Great Jheri Curl Debate
Veralynn Jackson knows hair, her neighborhood, and she also knows that the invention of the Jheri Curl marks the end of the world… or at least a career shift. When she takes a job in Mr. Kim’s Korean-owned Black beauty supply store, she’s in her element, until the posters start talking to her. For Mr. Kim, closed off by what he’s left behind to be in the U.S., the last thing he wants is this nosy new employee prodding him to expose old wounds. Their eventual friendship opens a door for each of them to reclaim their lost art.
Fourteen
In the near future, a robot named Laura has joined a high school to see if it can learn as humans do. Two girls, Ruth and Teri, decide that the superiority of computers would make Laura the perfect class president. When Laura helps Madison, the school bully, with her math homework, she adopts Laura as her best (and perhaps only) friend, and joins the campaign. After a disastrous assembly ends their election dreams, Madison learns that loneliness can’t be answered by a machine.
Dracula
When your survival is at stake… will you be able to distinguish the monster from the man? Both terrifying and riotous, Kate Hamill’s imaginative, gender-bending “feminist revenge fantasy” is like no Dracula you’ve ever seen—exploring the nature of predators and reinventing the story as a smart, disquieting, darkly comic drama. Hamill’s signature style and postmodern wit upends this familiar tale of Victorian vampires—driving a stake through the heart of toxic masculinity.
College Colors
This four character play follows a pair of black and white male roommates entering college in the 1960, juxtaposed with a pair of black and white female roommates in 2016.
Eight Tales of Pedro
EIGHT TALES OF PEDRO begins in 17th century Mexico, as Pedro and his companion travel from a small port town into the fabled Veracruz, telling stories while following Pedro’s one true love. Meanwhile, in the present day, in a van full of Mexican immigrants, Peter crosses a border into an unfamiliar country, while his companions tell him stories to chase away his fears. The two storytellers risk everything as their lives and plots intertwine.
The Far Country
In the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act, an unlikely family carries invented biographies and poems of longing on an arduous journey from rural Taishan to Angel Island Detention Center, in hopes of landing in San Francisco. Intimate and epic, THE FAR COUNTRY weighs the true cost of selling the past for the hope of a brighter future.