THE AMERICA PLAY
by Suzan-Lori Parks
A Staged Reading
Directed by Ifa Bayeza
THE AMERICA PLAY is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Dramatists Play Service.
Tuesday April 28, 8 pm
Wednesday April 29, 4 pm/8 pm
New Theater Hollywood
6500 Santa Monica Blvd.
Free, Seating is Limited
The Brick and the New Theater Hollywood are pleased to present a staged reading of The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Ifa Bayeza and coinciding with MONUMENTS, an exhibition co-organized by The Brick and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
Centering on the Foundling Father, a Black Abraham Lincoln impersonator who digs “an exact replica of The Great Hole of History,” in which he re-lives Lincoln’s assassination over and over, Parks’ work considers the excavation and absences of historical narratives, mourning and memory, and reenactment.
Featuring
BARON KELLY
KAREN MALINA WHITE
MIA ELLIS
With
RYAN MICHAEL DUNN
HERO MARGUERITE
SHANE SALK
Music and Sound by
HARVEY MASON
Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning playwright, director, composer, novelist and educator. A finalist for the 2020 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre and for the 2020 Francesca Primus Prize, Bayeza was the inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a 2022 MacDowell Fellow. Bayeza works, through both a creative nonfiction and fictional lens, explore pivotal intersections of race throughout history and in the present. Plays include multi-award-winner The Till Trilogy (The Ballad of Emmett Till; That Sumner in Sumner and Benevolence); String Theory; Infants of the Spring and Ta’zieh Between Two Rivers. Her musical Bunk Johnson … a blues poem is in workshop at Arena Stage, and her T.Y.A. comedy Kid Zero, in development at Center Stage Baltimore. Bayeza also co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange, the "gorgeous" (NY Times), "magical" (Elle), “dazzling” (Essence) novel Some Sing, Some Cry. Her newest play, One Small Alice, commissioned by the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis GENERATION NOW Initiative was featured at the 2024 Kennedy Center Festival of New Works. A current fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a 2026 inductee into the into The College of Fellows of the American Theatre, Bayeza is a graduate of Harvard University with an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
This program is presented in conjunction with MONUMENTS, an exhibition co-organized and co-presented by The Brick and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA).