In this 5- to 6-day immersion workshop we bring together actors, directors, playwright, and dramaturge to create the bones of new work, or to continue shaping a work in progress. A deep dive into the creative process, the workshop culminates in a free staged reading for the public, where we invite the community to participate in an honest conversation led by a skilled dramaturge about the work, its impact, and potential for new cultural understandings
Closely Related Keys
An African-American attorney with a successful career discovers she has an Iraqi half-sister. This play puts a fresh spin on racial relations gives each of its characters their own voice and point of view as they navigate in a world that has become interconnected and multicultural on every level.
Modern Minstrelsy
On a hot August night in 2009 in a predominantly white community on Long Island, NY, an African American man shoots and kills a white teenager who with three friends has been chasing in their car that man’s 20-year-old son. That shooting triggers not only charges and a trial but also the apparent “re-surfacing” of Nig and Jig, two timeless African American and Irish American figures respectively, who are locked in a seemingly never-ending struggle for agency, place, and point of view in their country’s history and psyche. - On a hot August night in a predominantly white community on Long Island, NY, an African American man shoots and kills a white teenager who with three friends has been chasing in their car that man’s 20-year-old son. The shooting triggers not only charges and trial but also the apparent “re-surfacing” of Nig and Jig, African American and Irish American figures respectively, who are locked in a seemingly never-ending struggle for agency, place, and point of view in America's history and psyche.
Empress Lily
Inspired by Shakespeare’s play, King Lear, Velina Hasu Houston re-conceives the legend with a Japanese female Lear and her three daughters, one of them mixed race, in a cultural arena where filial obligation is a tie that binds.