Season Two

The Death of Bessie Smith by Edward Albee

Director: Jonathan Solari
Dramaturg: Samantha Levitt
Cast: Jessica Afton*, Brian D. Coats*, Jamyl Dobson*, Paul Wilcox, Edwin Lee Gibson*, Keilly McQuail, James Patrick Nelson*
Design Team: Claire DeLiso, Brandon Bagwell, Laura Cunningham, Marissa Bergman
Stage Management Team: Clarissa Ligon, Jeannipher Pacheco

*These Actors appeared courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association.
Edward Albee's The Death of Bessie Smith was presented by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc., New York.

In December 2013, Interfaith Medical Center in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn was slated to close a few weeks into the new year. The hospital, which serves a medically under-served swath of New York City, had fallen out of the headlines despite the efforts of neighborhood activists and labor allies to keep the hospital open.

We reached out to Interfaith that December and one month later, on January 9, 2014, opened our site-specific production of Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith, performed inside the hospital. With support from the I M Foundation led by Diane Porter, we were able to extend performances through March 9. Tickets were free. Approximately 1800 people saw the show, and we sold out 22 of 28 performances. Our production was the first New York revival of the play in 46 years.

We produced the show in order to highlight the threat of imminent closure that the hospital faced and to provoke a citywide conversation about health, race, and class. The play itself, set in a whites-only hospital in 1937, uses the legend of the famous blues singer’s death in order to portray a soul-crushing climate of injustice and hostility. We followed each performance by holding post-show discussions with the audience, the cast, and invited leaders in the arts, government, labor, and health. Our special guests included legendary artist and activist Harry Belafonte, U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffriez, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, Assembly members Annette Robinson and Walter Mosley; City Council members Robert Cornegy, Laurie Cumbo, and Steve Levin; NYSNA executive director Jill Furillo, activist Sharonnie Perry of the Interfaith Community Advisory Board, Diane Porter of the Interfaith Board of Trustees, and Reverend Shaun J. Lee of Mount Lebanon Baptist Church.

The public attention that the show generated for the hospital was phenomenal, as were the stories about our work. The Huffington Post said the play’s “story of ill will, poor communication and failed provision of medical care, extends far beyond New York City.”

We were proud to use the arts to contribute to the movement to save the hospital. Today, thanks in part to public pressure, the hospital remains open on a surer footing than it’s had in years and has emerged out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

New Adaptation by Jeff Strabone
Director: Jonathan Solari
Cast: Andy Weyenberg, Eryn O’ Sullivan, Matthew Dray, Dave Ward, Aaron Gumm, Dave Comer
Design Team: Brandon Bagwell, Marthe Hoffmann, Courtney Nelson, Liz Panneton
Produced in association with: Boston University Professional Theatre Initiative

On January 9, 2014, an estimated 10,000 gallons of MCHM (4-methylcyclohexane methanol) spilled into West Virginia’s Elk River from a facility run by Freedom Industries. The spill was one mile upstream from West Virginia’s principal water intake and distribution center. After the spill, 300,000 West Virginians were warned by their governor not to use their household water for “drinking, cooking, washing, or bathing”.

In June of the same year, we staged a site-specific production of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play An Enemy of the People near the site of the chemical spill. An Enemy of the People is about a man who discovers evidence that a local business has been unknowingly polluting the town’s hot springs, the town’s main source of revenue and jobs. We’ve chosen to do this play at this place at this time in order to provoke a conversation about science, industry, the environment, government, public safety, and democracy: What is the best way to balance all of these elements? And who has the power to decide what that balance should be?

Each performance was followed by a post-show talkback dialogue between the audience, the cast, and invited elected officials, scientists, and community leaders.

Though written over 130 years ago, An Enemy of the People is a play for our time but with special relevance for West Virginians as they try to chart their future in the wake of the Elk River chemical spill. As lives and jobs hang in the balance, how can the people determine who has their best interests at heart and who is the enemy of the people?

Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People tells the story of Thomas Stockmann, who discovers evidence that the baths, his town’s main source of revenue and jobs, are being polluted by a local industry. Stockmann must find the strength to stand up to opposition from the press, civic leaders, and, most importantly, the local government. Peter Stockmann, the mayor of the town and Thomas’s brother, is more concerned with the economic benefits of keeping the baths open for the tourist season. What follows is a battle about the meaning and validity of evidence. Does scientific evidence speak for itself? What happens when evidence is contested by competing interests? And how do we know whom to trust, particularly when the person presenting the evidence may have interests of his own?

VIŞNE BAHÇESI (The Cherry Orchard) by Anton Chekhov

New Adaptation by Courtney Nelson, Elizabeth Stern, Jonathan Solari
Director: Jonathan Solari
Translated by Yaprak Ünver
Dramaturg: Gwendolyn Collaço
Cast: Ahmet Öztürk, Yaprak Ünver, Almira Ince, Özgecan Ayhan, Ferit Çelik, Canberk Doğalı
Design Team: Courtney Nelson

In May 2013, protests broke out in Turkey over plans by the government to replace Istanbul’s Gezi Park with a new shopping mall and apartments. In July 2013, elsewhere in the city, the government began bulldozing the Yedikule gardens that line the fifth-century Byzantine walls of old Constantinople. In the eyes of the protestors, the government's plans put development at odds with historical memory, sustainable living, and preservation.

Immediately following the first round of voting in Turkey’s 2014 presidential election, New Brooklyn Theatre, in association with Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, staged a site-specific production of a new adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in Turkish in Istanbul. The Cherry Orchard shows the decline of one class, the rise of another, and how an ancestral estate changes hands at a historical turning point: an apt choice for the Yedikule gardens as they face new questions of development and community impact.

Read Revive Reclaim

In June of 2014, New Brooklyn Theatre launched a monthly series of readings of historic, but seldom seen, plays by African American playwrights. The series began with the oldest surviving play written by an African-American playwright, and moved forward chronologically, from the Antebellum period through the Harlem Renaissance.

Revisiting these lost treasures provoked a much-needed conversation about the construction of the canon of American theatre. How might our theatrical practices and assumptions be transformed by engaging these forgotten chapters of our collective past?

After hearing the plays performed and listening to audiences, Rachel was chosen as the play that would receive a full production in our third season.

All of the readings were performed in Bed-Stuy’s Akwaaba Mansion.

The Escape by William Wells Brown

June 22, 2014
Directed by Carl Cofield
Cast: Sheyenne Javonne Brown, Chris Cook, Toni Ann DeNoble, Matthew Dunivan, Jack Gallagher, Anthony Golden Jr., Jarvis Griggs, Kristie Larson, Lauren Lattimore, Samantha Levitt, Adam Petchel, Ben Prayz, Phillip Shinn, Marcel Spears, Nate Steinwachs, Justin Thomas

Dessalines by William Edgar Easton

July 27, 2014
Directed by Reginald Douglas
Cast: Stephon Bishop, Bjorn DuPaty, Toni Ann DeNoble, Jack Gallagher, Marcus D. Harvey, Miriam A. Hyman, Paul Notice, Larry Powell, Marcel Spears, Justin Thomas,
Chinaza Uche

Rachel by Angelina Weld Grimké

August 24, 2014
Directed by Ebony Noelle Golden
Cast: Amara James Aja, Segun Akande, Lynette R. Freeman, Audrey Hailes, Comfort Katchy, Chinaza Uche, C. Kelly Wright

Cold Keener by Zora Neale Hurston

September 21, 2014
Directed by Courtney Harge
Produced in association with Colloguy Collective
Cast: Ayomide Akinsanya, Sheyenne Javonne Brown, Toni Ann DeNoble, Seth Diggs, Jerron Herman, Lauren Lattimore, Wi-Moto Nyoka, David Arlington Smith,
Justin Thomas