Season Three
CELEBRATING THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS


New Brooklyn Theatre has dedicated its 2015 season to the past, present, and future of African-American women playwrights. In 2014, the company staged a series of readings of historic, but neglected, African-American plays from the 1850s to the 1930s with the promise that audiences would help the company select one for a full production. In 2015, the company will fulfill that promise by producing audience favorite, Rachel by Angelina Weld Grimké.

The second production of the season will be the NYC premiere of Las Meninas by Lynn Nottage, a Brooklyn-based recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Pulitzer Prize. Despite being written nearly a century apart, Rachel and Las Meninas both explore repressed histories and the fear of bringing children into unjust societies. Both plays will run in repertory from August 5 to 29 at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Both productions are supported by a generous subsidy from the Irondale Center.

Beginning in late September, the company will mount The Second Century, a festival of new plays by ten emerging or early-career African-American female playwrights. If Angelina Weld Grimké is a marker for an African-American female playwright's past, and Lynn Nottage is an example of a phenomenal African-American female playwright in the present, then it is important to help promote works of young African-American female playwrights, those who will play a great role in shaping the American theatre's future. With The Second Century, named to mark Rachel's centennial, New Brooklyn Theatre aims to do just that.

All performances will be followed by post-show discussions between the audience, the cast, and invited leaders from governmental, activist, artistic, and academic circles.

In keeping with the company’s history and mission, all shows will be free to the public.

LAS MENINAS

Lynn Nottage's Las Meninas was written in 2002. Directed by Jonathan Solari, Las Meninas tells the story of the love affair between Louis XIV’s wife Queen Marie-Thérèse and Nabo, her African servant, through the imagination of their illegitimate daughter.

RACHEL

Rachel (1916) was commissioned by the NAACP as a response to D. W. Griffith’s racist feature film The Birth of a Nation. Directed by Courtney Harge, Grimké’s powerful play takes us inside the home of a family attempting to cope with the aftermath of the lynching of a father and son. In a year when the streets ring with chants of “Black Lives Matter,” Rachel asks us to feel the quiet pain of a young black woman who doubts whether she can bear to bring more lives into a violent world.

THE SECOND CENTURY

New York City is the theatrical capital of the English-speaking world, yet no African-American playwright had work produced on Broadway last year. New, important plays are being written but, instead of reaching an audience, they sit mutely in the drawers of deferred dreams. A city that boasts of its diversity is being let down by its theatres. The Second Century, named to mark Rachel‘s centennial, aims to bring attention to this ongoing problem. Each reading will be performed in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.