Crossroads
Black stories on stage
No maids. No crackheads. No Tyler Perry*.
Crossroads is a collaboration of 3 new Black playwrights whose works come from or deal with how race intersects with other identities such as gender, sexuality, and class. The idea of the crossroads is linked to Voodoo, African American folklore, and Delta blues songs about the crossroads being a place where the strange and unexpected happens – you could speak with the dead, meet spirits, or even sell your soul to the Devil on the crossroads. Crossroads honors the idea that our works, simply because they exist and come from us, challenge popular notions about what Black theatre is and what it means.
The first production will be Tulpa, or Anne&Me, a full-length, semi-autobiographical play that confronts the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality through pop culture, womanism, and Tibetan mysticism.
When a tulpa in the form of Anne Hathaway crawls out of your television, what do you do? What do you talk about? What hopes, fears, desires, and resentments emerge? How would you change one other?
Tulpa, or Anne&Me explores the hidden inner life of a Black woman in order to expose how marginalization traumatizes the human psyche, thus taking the first steps toward healing it.
(* Subject to change this part. I loathe the sort of status quo Tyler Perry upholds, but that has nothing to do with whether or not he has the right to do whatever.)
I'm pretty anti-Tyler Perry so I love that part, but I imagine the more press you get means it'll become a common questions the media will want to ask you. If you don't mind continuously answering that question, you should keep it in.
ReplyDeleteLove the description of Crossroads.
Also, do you have some means people can contribute to your productions without being there? Whether monetarily or some banner that can be posted on websites?
Not yet. We're working on it though.
ReplyDelete