BY DOUGLAS TURNER WARD
DIRECTED BY AARON ZILBERMANN

Click on a date to purchase Tickets:

MARCH 23, 2018 AT 7:30PM
MARCH 24, 2018 AT 7:30PM
MARCH 25, 2018 AT 2:00PM

General Admission: $12

Day of Absence is a satirical fantasy about an imaginary Southern town where all the black people have suddenly disappeared. The only ones left are sick and lying in hospital beds, refusing to get well. Infants are crying because they are being tended to by strange parents. The Mayor pleads for the President, Governor, and the NAACP to send him "a jackpot of jigaboos." On a nationwide radio network he calls on the blacks, wherever they are, to come back. He shows them the cloths with which they wash cars and the brushes with which they shine shoes as sentimental reminders of the goodies that await them.

A play by Amiri Baraka

June 9 & 10 at 7:30PM
June 11 at 2PM
 

General Admission: $12

A powerful one-act drama, Dutchman brought immediate and lasting attention to poet Amiri Baraka. The play is a searing two-character confrontation that begins playfully but builds rapidly in suspense and symbolic resonance. Set on a New York subway train, Dutchman opens with a well-dressed, intellectual, young African American man named Clay absorbed in reading a magazine. He is interrupted by Lula—a flirtatious, beautiful white woman a bit older than he. As Lula suggestively slices and eats an apple, she and Clay tease each other with bantering talk that becomes more and more personal. She reveals little about herself, but Lula is clearly in control of the conversation and the situation as she perceptively and provokingly challenges Clay’s middle-class self image. Lula is, in fact, a bit cruel.