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Archive for July, 2010

Jul 17

MIRRORS in FIRE! New Play Festival

 

Summer is flying by and things are heating up here in Brooklyn, NY. I happily returned to New York City on July 4th to a city in the middle of a heat wave and intense revelry. Here I’ve been writing and collaborating with brilliant artistic minds, not to mention enjoying some satisfying NYC take out.

Next week my newest play, MIRRORS, will receive a staged reading as part of Freedom Train Productions’ FIRE! New Play Festival and in culmination of my playwriting residency. I became really inspired to write about the world of MIRRORS when I went with a friend to see a photography exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this winter. One photograph in particular really grabbed me. It was an image of a hair salon in the front room of a shotgun house somewhere down South. The photographer captured the house from the outside of the screen door, and you could see the photographer’s reflection in the door as well as the sprawling contents of the house. The layers drew me in. As I stood gazing at this photograph, the sights and sounds of a childhood spent in the South came back to me. I could feel the relentless summer heat and hear the tree insects calling. I felt like I knew who these people were and what story they needed to tell.

Here’s a super succinct synopsis of what MIRRORS is all about: Two women mourn the loss of a loved one while sifting through the secrets of their shared past.  If you’re anywhere in the New York City area on Friday, July 23rd, you should most definitely come on down to Fort Greene, Brooklyn and check it out. I hope to see many of you there!

MIRRORS  by Azure D. Osborne-Lee
Directed by Mekeva McNeil
Featuring Suzanne Darrell, Treasure Davidson, Shereen Macklin, Tish Mann, Mekeva McNeil, and Lori Parquet

Friday, July 23rd @ 7:30pm
South Oxford Space
138 South Oxford Street
Fort Greene, Brooklyn
Tickets $5-10, available in advance at Brown Paper Tickets.

Photo of roses by flickr user Beverly & Pack

Jul 1

Sycorax, a Postmortem

 SYCORAX has closed and I am now preparing myself to take on the rest of my summer. But first, I believe a little reflection is called for.

My time with the Weird Sisters Collective in Austin, TX was a good one. In the sweltering Texas heat I took on the role of a lifetime. For those of you who didn’t get a chance to see the show, I played both Sycorax, healer of Algiers, and her son Caliban. The sometimes suave, sometimes gruff Caliban made appearances in both the pre-show performance of an excerpt of the Tempest and in the epilogue of SYCORAX.

Working collaboratively together, we built SYCORAX from a lean script and some bolts of fabric into a dynamic peformance experience. The process of moving from rehearsal to opening was documented by a visiting scholar, Ann Pleiss Morris, who will be including an account of the show in a chapter of her forthcoming dissertation. I think that I can speak for all of us when I say that the more time that we spent working with the collective, the more we felt invested and (dare I say it?) loved.

Each of the performances, with their audiences of varying sizes, was unique, each show having its own energy, its own life. SYCORAX was a truly engaging and thought-provoking performance experience, not just for me, but for the critics as well. If you want to know what the reviewers had to say about SYCORAX and the Weird Sisters Collective, check out the links at the bottom of this post.

Overall, I have to share with you all that I am not sad to be leaving Sycorax behind, because something tells me that this will not the last that I see of her. Stay tuned, folks. Sycorax will live on, and I’ll let you know more about it just as soon as I get the details myself. In the meanwhile, my people, stay cool.

The Austinist’s review.
The Examiner’s review.
Austin Live Theatre’s review.

Photo by Ann Pleiss Morris
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