MONDAY, MARCH 20
TUESDAY, MARCH 21
HB PLAYWRIGHTS THEATRE
– 7:00 PM–
Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie-Award winning playwright Dael Orlandersmith brings her latest work to HB Studio for an exclusive New York engagement. Focused on the social unrest in Ferguson, MO after the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, the one-woman show explores the experience of an American community through the eyes of multiple characters, developed by Dael through her extensive interviews with St. Louis residents. Commissioned by The Rep in 2016, and featuring music by Elliott Sharp, we hope you can join us for this very special benefit presentation. Benefit proceeds support HB’s world-renowned training, practice, and development programs for aspiring and professional theater artists.
“There is a tough and necessary beauty in {her} writing…Orlandersmith hears the human need for dignity and justice, for love. She is critic, witness, and poet.”– Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America.
Sharp is “a composer and guitarist who has been one of downtown’s most influential and prolific musicians…” – The New York Times
CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS
$250: PREMIERE SEATING
$125: PREFERRED SEATING
$75: STANDARD SEATING
HB PRODUCER’S CIRCLE: PRIORITY SEATING
– All tickets include VIP Reception –
Please note: A limited number of $25 Student Rush tickets will be available the week of performances.
About the Artists
DAEL ORLANDERSMITH
Dael first performed UNTIL THE FLOOD at St. Louis Rep in winter 2016. She will be bringing the solo play to Rattlestick Theatre in New York City and Milwaukee Repertory Theatre in 2018. Her solo play FOREVER will performed in summer 2017 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, after successful runs at New York Theatre Workshop (2015) in New York City and Portland Center Stage (2016) in Portland, OR. Her new play, LADY IN DENMARK, will open fall 2017 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.
Orlandersmith has collaborated with the Goodman on STOOP STORIES, first performed in 2008 at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival and Apollo Theater’s Salon Series; Washington, DC’s Studio Theatre produced its world premiere in 2009. BLACK N’ BLUE BOYS/BROKEN MEN was developed as a co-commission between the Goodman and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where it was staged in May 2012. Her play HORSEDREAMS was developed at New Dramatists and workshopped at New York Stage and Film Company in 2008, and was performed at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in 2011. BONES premiered in 2010 at the Mark Taper Forum, who also commissioned the work. Ms. Orlandersmith premiered THE BLUE ALBUM, in collaboration with David Cale, at Long Wharf Theatre in 2007.
YELLOWMAN was commissioned by and premiered at McCarter Theatre in a co-production with The Wilma Theater and Long Wharf Theatre. Ms. Orlandersmith was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Drama Desk Award nominee for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Actress in a Play for YELLOWMAN in 2002. THE GIMMICK, commissioned by McCarter Theatre, premiered in their Second Stage OnStage series in 1998 and went on to great acclaim at Long Wharf Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop; Ms. Orlandersmith won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for THE GIMMICK in 1999. Her play MONSTER premiered at New York Theatre Workshop in November 1996. Ms. Orlandersmith has toured extensively with the Nuyorican Poets Café (Real Live Poetry) throughout the United States, Europe and Australia. Vintage Books and Dramatists Play Service have published YELLOWMAN and a collection of her earlier works. Ms. Orlandersmith attended Sundance Institute Theatre Lab for four summers and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, The Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, a Guggenheim and the 2005 PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for a playwright in mid-career. She is the recipient of a Lucille Lortel Foundation Playwrights Fellowship and an OBIE Award for BEAUTY’S DAUGHTER (1995).
ELLIOTT SHARP
Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over 150 recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.
His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.
Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson’s Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a recent documentary “Doing The Don’t” by filmmaker Bert Shapiro.
For more information, including discography, click here. Listen to a recent interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered”. http://www.npr.org/2012/09/22/161539917/elliott-sharp-blues-is-a-feeling
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Questions? Contact Megan Foehr, Development Manager, at 212-675-2370 x. 39 or mfoehr@hbstudio.org.
Trouble with reservations? Contact Sara Kuntz, Audience & Development Coordinator, at 212-989-6540 or skuntz@hbstudio.org.