THE GOSPEL OF LOVINGKINDNESS

BY MARCUS GARDLEY

JANUARY 2016

Marcus Gardley gifts the Ubuntu Theater Project with another contemporary drama addressing one of the most pressing issues of our time—gun violence in America. The Gospel of Lovingkindness poetically renders how gun violence can ravage our homes and break our hearts. With song and poetry The Gospel of Lovingkindness is at once an outcry against the cycle of violence; a revelation of humanity’s redemptive strength within the worst circumstances imaginable; and a prayer seeking the cycle’s end with forgiveness, dignity and hope.

EXIT CUCKOO (NANNY IN MOTHERLAND)

BY LISA RAMIREZ

FEBRUARY 2016

A play by Ubuntu Theater Project Company Member, Lisa Ramirez, EXIT CUCKOO (nanny in motherland) charts the lives of nannies, mothers and children trying to get by in a complicated social-political matrix that makes the responsibility of parenting and child care a difficult emotionally tangled legal and moral web. This is a tale of daily triumphs by a US Latina solo performer and writer who has received widespread critical acclaim and recently won the Helen Merrill Award for playwriting in New York City.

I AM MY OWN WIFE

BY DOUG WRIGHT

MARCH 2016

I Am My Own Wife is Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize Winning one person play about Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf—a transgender woman who survived Nazi Germany and East Germany under Stasi surveillance.

Featuring Co-Artistic Director, William Hodgson will play all 40 characters as we explore how the complexity of protecting one’s body in this historical context relates to our present time.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH

BY FRANK GALATI

FROM THE NOVEL BY JOHN STEINBECK

APRIL 2016

Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath out of the rage he felt at the way in which forcibly displaced migrants from Oklahoma were treated upon their arrival in California. In our current time of global warming, mass migration, refugee crises, drought, and excessive wealth disparities, the themes coursing through Steinbeck’s classic are alive today and poignant for our time.

Steinbeck characterized the Joad journey as a march. And in our production the Joad family sings and marches on their journey to keep the human spirit alive as we aim to reveal the American myth at the core of this classic.

MÁS

BY MILTA ORTIZ

MAY 2016

Más by Milta Ortiz is a docudrama that champions the true story of a Chicano community in Tucson, Arizona struggling to retain their cultural identity as they fight to save Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District. This play is wrapped in music, dance, and ritual and reveals the real cost of fighting to keep one’s culture alive.

The production is a co-production between Ubuntu Theater Project and Laney College’s Fusion Theatre Project and the Theatre Arts Department led by Michael Torres.

OTHELLO

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

JUNE 2016

Othello is Shakespeare's conversion of a morality play into a story that challenges our pre-conceived notions and inspires a more complex outlook upon what we consider Good and Evil. Othello begins the play having converted from Islam to Christianity in order to wed Desdemona. And, arguably, at the end of the play he re-converts to Islam. In Shakespeare's time 'Moor' was a catch-all for every Muslim living within the Ottoman empire--from Spain, to North Africa to the Middle East. The Moor represented a blind spot in the consciousness of the Elizabethans worldview.

America now faces another confrontation with what some have determined to be an 'Other' and our consciousness is once again full of blind spots.

HURT VILLAGE

BY KATORI HALL

JULY 2016

Hurt Village follows a housing project in Memphis, Tennessee when a government Hope Grant ignites the relocation of many of the project’s residents, including the 13 year-old aspiring rapper Cookie and the matriarchs in her family, mother Crank and great-grandmother Big Mama.

This play is a bold, gritty and heart-wrenching piece, which earned Katori Hall the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. As gentrification and affordable housing continue to dominate our national headlines, this play demands our attention and care.