https://www.ifabayeza.com/the-ballad-of-emmett-till daily 0.75 2023-09-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613443348452-KCT9FNVX642WO5ZR0RLO/till%2Bmag%2Bcover.jpg The Ballad of Emmett Till - The Ballad of Emmett Till received a Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference fellowship and premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2008, winning the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Play. The Ballad made its West Coast premiere at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles in 2010, garnering six Ovation Awards, including Best Production; four Drama Desk Critics’ Circle Awards, including Best Production; and the Backstage Garland Award for Best Playwriting. Acclaimed productions followed with the Houston Ensemble Theatre and the National Black Theatre Festival in 2011, Penumbra Theatre in 2014, and Ion Theatre in 2017, where it earned top honors at the San Diego Critics Circle Craig Noel Award, including Outstanding Dramatic Production. Tobias Keene, D.D.S. Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Tobias Keene brings a bit of unabashed Southern hospitality to all his patients. He moved to Washington, D.C. over thirty years ago as a freshman at Ivy College. Right after graduation, he attended World University’s School of Dentistry. Before opening Keene Dental in 1994, he worked for free clinics and some of the finest practices in the District. He is part of the 123 Dental Association and stays up-to-date on the latest dental discoveries. When not striving to keep his patients happy and healthy, he’s enjoys hiking with his family in Rock Creek Park. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613436226008-Q4IA5TV1Q9XO0QLQLINQ/Till_Good_Poster.jpg The Ballad of Emmett Till A month after his fourteenth birthday, a confident Chicago youth, a boy on the threshold of manhood, embarks on a summer trip to Mississippi. His saga changes the course of a nation… but what of his own journey? The Ballad of Emmett Till is an ensemble play for six actors, exploring of the final days in the life of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who takes a fateful trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Till’s murder and his mother's subsequent decision to have an open-casket funeral are believed by many to mark the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The Ballad is a contemporary telling of Emmett’s story, a jazz integration of past and present, the events as seen from the perspective of the youth himself. It is the story of a quest, Emmett’s pursuit of happiness, of liberty and ultimately of life. Script and licensing available through TRW. https://www.ifabayeza.com/bunk-johnson-a-blues-poem daily 0.75 2023-09-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/0089b963-04bd-43bb-a985-4e60eac99e52/bunk+johnson+bright.jpg Bunk Johnson: A Blues Poem Inveterate Liar Drunk Musical Genius Historian of JAZZ is back on top! June 19, 1949, New Iberia Louisiana, on the grounds of the old plantation home Shadows-on-the Teche, trumpeter Bunk Johnson, much to the consternation of his wife Maud, gathers friends together to announce his comeback! Now that he stands poised to resume his rightful place as a world-famous Jazz cat, he’s throwing a party. The former “yardman” at the Shadows, between tunes, regales his guests with tales of his wondrous, wandering life -- how he was there at the birth of Jazz, played with the great Buddy Bolden and taught Louis Armstrong. Maud, whose family once was enslaved at the Shadows, just wants to go home. But where is home for the wanderer? https://www.ifabayeza.com/infants-of-the-spring daily 0.75 2021-02-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613458560331-L9NJI3EDN049J9OTCHH1/infants%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bspring%2Bcast.jpg Infants of the Spring Tobias Keene, D.D.S. Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Tobias Keene brings a bit of unabashed Southern hospitality to all his patients. He moved to Washington, D.C. over thirty years ago as a freshman at Ivy College. Right after graduation, he attended World University’s School of Dentistry. Before opening Keene Dental in 1994, he worked for free clinics and some of the finest practices in the District. He is part of the 123 Dental Association and stays up-to-date on the latest dental discoveries. When not striving to keep his patients happy and healthy, he’s enjoys hiking with his family in Rock Creek Park. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613457977497-TWKG4CJY0I9US3AQZ9GU/infants+poster.jpg Infants of the Spring - First Name Last Name Based on real events, Wallace Thurman’s classic novel Infants of the Spring vividly examines the legendary Harlem Renaissance from the inside out with a virtual portrait gallery of the major African American literary personalities of the time. Ifa Bayeza’s new adaptation of Thurman’s incendiary work puts the entire New Negro Movement under indictment, challenging the power of art to create true social change and exposing the peril to the individual artist seeking to meet that expectation. A generation of writers blazed brilliantly and brazenly for an era and then, but for a few, became lost for decades. Set in 1929, Thurman’s prescient novel foresees the fall. Equally hilarious and poignant, the tragicomedy captures the jagged fibrillating pulse of the American Jazz Age at its height and glorious end. https://www.ifabayeza.com/contact daily 0.75 2023-09-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/b838fccb-dac5-4017-88c4-87a3c0ecd995/Ifa+Bayeza+at+work+MacDowell.jpg Contact https://www.ifabayeza.com/home-1 daily 1.0 2023-09-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613434575049-7ZGGW1QJHOJDQG41RNQE/IFA%2BBAYEZA_Katrina_Wittkamp_credit.jpg Home - Playwright. Director. Activist. Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning theatre artist, novelist and educator. She works through both a creative nonfiction and fictional lens to explore pivotal intersections of race throughout history. The Till Trilogy interprets the epic saga of Civil Rights icon Emmett Till. Her novel Some Sing, Some Cry, co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange, chronicles 200 years of African American music through seven generations of women. Her drama String Theory, in a quartet of voices, relives the voyage of the Amistad slave ship and the tragicomedy Welcome to Wandaland, her experience of desegregation in St. Louis post-Brown vs. Board of Education. Musicals include Charleston Olio on the birth of the Jazz Age and Bunk Johnson, A Blues Poem on the life of the legendary Jazz trumpeter. Currently commissioned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, she is collaborating with twelve writers in New Iberia Louisiana to reconstruct the historic narrative of Shadows-on-the-Teche, a former sugarcane plantation. A graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in Theatre from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the 2018 inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities was a finalist for the 2020 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre and for the 2020 Francesca Primus Prize. https://www.ifabayeza.com/benevolence daily 0.75 2021-02-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613453961430-F9C2XCEQ7SOJ80F6Z27E/Benevolence_act+i.png Benevolence - it is an ordinary day weekday wednesday late august already hot in the dark before dawn two couples prepare to face the day and each other Benevolence is the third play in The Till Trilogy, exploring the epic saga of Civil Rights icon Emmett Louis Till, the Chicago teenager whose fateful trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1955 is believed by many to mark the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The drama for four actors explores the transformation in the Mississippi Delta in the wake of Emmett’s death, the toll of the legacy of enslavement on the smallest units of our society, the family and individual. From the eyes of two women and the men in their lives, it is an intimate play, a tale of love and loss. Like the land in its time, Benevolence is segregated. Act I is white. Act II is black. In each world, the other is present, but invisible. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613455399279-GBVS3NJM8FGQJFBCX5DX/Benevolence_act+ii.png Benevolence - Reviewers Weigh In… Tobias Keene, D.D.S. Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Tobias Keene brings a bit of unabashed Southern hospitality to all his patients. He moved to Washington, D.C. over thirty years ago as a freshman at Ivy College. Right after graduation, he attended World University’s School of Dentistry. Before opening Keene Dental in 1994, he worked for free clinics and some of the finest practices in the District. He is part of the 123 Dental Association and stays up-to-date on the latest dental discoveries. When not striving to keep his patients happy and healthy, he’s enjoys hiking with his family in Rock Creek Park. https://www.ifabayeza.com/welcome-to-wandaland daily 0.75 2021-02-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613458234698-65WJ32Y3S1SR08L64TC4/wandaland+chalkboard.png Welcome to Wandaland Tobias Keene, D.D.S. Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Tobias Keene brings a bit of unabashed Southern hospitality to all his patients. He moved to Washington, D.C. over thirty years ago as a freshman at Ivy College. Right after graduation, he attended World University’s School of Dentistry. Before opening Keene Dental in 1994, he worked for free clinics and some of the finest practices in the District. He is part of the 123 Dental Association and stays up-to-date on the latest dental discoveries. When not striving to keep his patients happy and healthy, he’s enjoys hiking with his family in Rock Creek Park. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613458207294-TEZAXZCGZ1H9J3JFN7X9/wandaland+newspaper.png Welcome to Wandaland - This is a test! St. Louis Missouri, 1959, fourth grader Wanda Williams seeks to unlock the secrets of an intelligence test that has catapulted her older sister into a newly desegregated, “gifted” school. Her sister Paulette convinces Wanda that she will fail unless she learns everything there is to know in the world. As she pursues her quest, her desire to be heard and seen within her own family confounds her understanding. Civil rights and the Cold War, the Space Race and test mania collide with gender, color, birth order, race, social class, and, of course, her sister. Wanda’s search for intelligence, masking the simple need to feel loved, stirs up an internal tempest almost as ferocious as the turbulence just outside her door. https://www.ifabayeza.com/that-summer-in-sumner daily 0.75 2021-02-16 https://www.ifabayeza.com/general-3 daily 0.75 2021-09-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1630606449814-INUTB15PTDGIS83WCPL0/IB_Web_Shadows_House+front.jpg New Iberia, LA: Shadows on the Teche - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1589847892040-G53S9LDM2C6KT8IQ3Z95/image-asset.jpeg New Iberia, LA: Shadows on the Teche https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1589847890812-TYA3V7W44Y5HEEQSI69P/image-asset.jpeg New Iberia, LA: Shadows on the Teche https://www.ifabayeza.com/about-1 daily 0.75 2021-02-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613451816680-E2V4V22RR6I7FNCS2ARM/a+photograph+9c.jpg About https://www.ifabayeza.com/tazieh daily 0.75 2021-02-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613457725337-DHQ48ZN16E28N30RFH4L/tazieh+flyer.png Ta'zieh: Between Two Rivers - First Name Last Name It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613457918558-3ROVLSKHCQ2BQCL43KFJ/tazieh+live.png Ta'zieh: Between Two Rivers - First Name Last Name Tobias Keene, D.D.S. Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Tobias Keene brings a bit of unabashed Southern hospitality to all his patients. He moved to Washington, D.C. over thirty years ago as a freshman at Ivy College. Right after graduation, he attended World University’s School of Dentistry. Before opening Keene Dental in 1994, he worked for free clinics and some of the finest practices in the District. He is part of the 123 Dental Association and stays up-to-date on the latest dental discoveries. When not striving to keep his patients happy and healthy, he’s enjoys hiking with his family in Rock Creek Park. https://www.ifabayeza.com/charleston-olio daily 0.75 2023-09-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613461112655-KBJ3UQMPTF3SQEM3OBXF/Screen+Shot+2021-02-15+at+11.34.02+PM.png Charleston Olio https://www.ifabayeza.com/about-2 daily 0.75 2021-02-16 https://www.ifabayeza.com/string-theory daily 0.75 2021-02-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613471634500-AVJUQYV5PGRMQ9FOR4CX/string%2Btheory.jpg String Theory - A bent, rusting nail! … Twisted in the shape of a key … Give us free! Give us free! GIVE US FREE! Scientists conjecture that little pieces of string are the foundation of our universe, binding it together, invisibly unifying the four forces of gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and the weak. String Theory examines the interlinking of four lives – an embittered ex-president, a young man of power, a radical Christian and a lost child. Together and apart, these four disparate elements forge a turning point in the battle over slavery, binding the forces of freedom, equality, justice and faith, pushing a nation toward its promise. Drawn from first-person accounts, String Theory gives living voice to the epic saga of La Amistad, the first civil and human rights case in American history. https://www.ifabayeza.com/book daily 0.75 2021-02-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/1613434978189-MWNIJYSG1P2X8Y48JV72/some+sing.jpg Book - Praise for Some Sing, Some Cry “Lyrical... Think of it as Roots with a treble clef—a confident, lively account of love, art and what falls between.” —Kirkus Reviews “Some Sing, Some Cry is a monumental work, on every level, that speaks to me personally. The sound of it, the feelings conveyed, and images conjured are astounding. So many colors and textures! And so profound in its subtleties. Some Sing, Some Cry is, without question, one of the greatest literary works of the ages. Thank you for this treasure.” – Phylicia Rashad, award-winning actor and director “In this epic saga, the sister-sister author combination of Bayeza and Shange offers a richly detailed and boldly colored account of one family's experience in slavery and its legacies for the generations that followed. Some Sing, Some Cry is both moving and arresting.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Read an excerpt here & buy your copy from your preferred bookseller below! https://www.ifabayeza.com/general-2 daily 0.75 2023-09-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/0da70e23-d7c3-4d5f-ab7f-7f2d4ab834c5/002_The+Till+Trilogy_That+Summer+in+Sumner_press+%281%29.jpg The TILL Trilogy - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602aff06f6b7c4321ae44924/a7631d66-6ff5-4155-9d0c-d94fc77c569c/007_The+Till+Trilogy_The+Ballad+of+Emmett+Till_press.jpg The TILL Trilogy - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.