Fri 6/23-Sun 6/25 @ 7PM
Playwright/novelist Ifa Bayeza is the sister of the late noted playwright Ntozake Shange, best known for her 1975 play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. But she’s a major figure in Black theater in her own right, author of the award-winning 2009 play The Ballad of Emmett Till.
Now she has been commissioned by the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue Theater Project to finish a play she’s been working on called The Rescue of John Price t be complted next year. It tells a different historical story with a happier ending than Emmett Till’s: it follows a slave who fled from Kentucky to sanctuary in Oberlin (as liberal then as it is now!) in 1858, and was pursued by slave catchers. But hundreds of Oberlin and Wellington residents organized to get him to Canada to prevent his return to slavery.
This weekend, the piece will have a series of free readings at Wurtzel Theater, 67 Main Street, on the Oberlin College campus. The director of the readings is Karamu CEO/president Tony F. Sias who is also projected to direct the completed play.
For more information and free tickets, go here.
101 North Professor Street, Oberlin, OH 44074