Broadway Black (BB): Stop. Reset. is your 12^th Goodman Theatre production. You are celebrating your 20^th anniversary at the Goodman Theatre as an Artistic Associate. What is the secret to your longevity?

Regina Taylor (RT): I feel that it’s been such a rare and wonderful treat at the Goodman Theatre and having longevity with an institution such as the Goodman. It is rare for any artist, especially a Black person, especially a Black woman, to be able to grow each year in developing one’s own voice. What is unique and special about that which you bring, what is your authenticity of full self that you bring to life and to your pieces? My pieces are markers in my life. I have been challenged in life and I challenge life with each and every piece. There is an opening to dare in each and every piece. With this one, I feel like I’ve learned everything along the way that I’m bringing fearlessly with my own tongue. Think about Miles Davis, you know who he is by that first note. That takes sounding like other people until you hit it and know that it’s yours. With this piece, I know that it’s mine. It’s an idiom of jazz. Each character is mine. In this piece there is an element of Afro-Futurism that harnesses both past and present when looking at who we are and how we survive into the future. It resonates with how we deal with what we’re dealing with right here and now and who we are. Who are children will be.

BB: Tell us about your latest work, Stop. Reset.

RT: Stop.Reset. is about 70-year-old Black bookstore owner Alexander Ames. He is trying to determine how to keep his business from being extinct. He is a lover of books. What they hold, their weight, smell and feel. Memories from the ancestors is what they hold. How they are transferred, palm to palm. He’s trying to figure out how that moves forward in the digital age. What does he need to hold onto and what does he need to let go? All of Ames’ bookstore workers are over 40 except one, J the 19 year old, who is semi-literate. So there is a generational conversation about the present and the future. Ames sees promise in J and recognizes himself, but J is interested only in the present and the future, not the past. 

It’s about books but also about how we deal with change. There are so many changes we’re grappling with in the present moment. People don’t change easily. People dig in their heels to figure out where they stand and fight for what they believe in and what they know, as the terrain is shifting, and we can’t trust the dirt under our feet. People either dig in or dive headlong into the unknown and embrace it. Stop. Reset. is not just about technology, but about where we are. It’s about race, gender, sexuality, the economy, all of these issues as they are shifting right now in terms of how we look at things. Who are we becoming? Who do we want to become?

The play is about what the audience brings to it in terms of their own history. What I set is conversations, arguments, dialogue, about how you deal with change. I try to give equal weight to various perspectives. Some will enter and be moved in terms of where they stand. Others may dig in and not move. What I hope to spark, to provoke, is the dialogue to look at the world and themselves. The question of the ground that we stand on. That’s the first spark of change. Or not. {Referencing Dr. Martin Luther’s Speech after the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965}: How long? Not long. How long has it been? We keep coming back to that phrase in different increments in time. Is it possible to escape one’s past and all that it brings? To escape the shadows that we drag behind us? I present the question for the audience to answer for themselves.

BB: Stop. Reset. is, in part, about the digital age and how that reflects the information we receive from various sources. How do you perceive the role of digital technology, especially as it relates to breaking news that reflects the African American community?

RT: There is great possibility. Digital technology has changed how we talk about race. Who owns the narrative? How Black males have historically been presented in the media. Here and now, there’s a transformation in terms of the tongue. Who’s speaking about it, who gets to frame the narrative? There is a “Stop and Reset” in the narrative that came from the ground, meaning the grassroots and social media. Once the floodgates opened, the mainstream had to follow. So there were more layers to that story than we expected. We’re seeing how these devices are being harnessed for our community, like #BlackLivesMatter. This is where we want to talk.

We are the ones who should be telling our stories. There is an opening for books. We have the spoken word and people would gather around the fire for the gatekeeper to tell the story. When books came along, we the masses would hold the knowledge with the ability to read. The hierarchy has been toppled. Who are we becoming with people alone with a book, cut off from the world? On the contrary, people are talking to their devices and these worlds open up to the masses. The gatekeepers are being toppled. Whose voice should be voiced and heard? Everyone has access. That’s the powerful part. How do we harness this power? How do we learn how to learn from this device? How do we teach ourselves the weight of each piece of the information without someone over us telling us which way to go? The opening is amazing. We can and have been telling our own stories. It’s about how we harness them.

BB: One of the questions that Stop. Reset. asks is whether books are obsolete. There are so many fewer African American newspapers and bookstores than there were twenty or fifty years ago. Is it just as important in what medium our stories are told?

RT: I look at adaptation and meeting new audiences. What does this technology bring? Who are these new audiences and how one shapes the others? Ebony, Jet, Haki Madhubuti are all examples of those who champion the written word. And what doors those magazines opened to me as a child in Dallas, Texas. Looking at how they framed the discussion of Black is Beautiful and how powerful those images were to me as a Black female moving forward. The diversity of identity opening that lens in terms of the world and how I saw myself. How those stories weren’t the same as those in the mainstream that reflected who I was, am, and can be. The importance of periodicals giving a reflection of self. How do you reflect that here within? Certain things can be erased if not held in a book. How do you pass that on so the legacy isn’t lost? What do we need in terms of that legacy? We need certain parts of our past, the understanding of how we’ve adapted all along. We will continue to adapt. We have continued to adapt and survived against all odds.

BB: You’ve described yourself as a purist when it comes to books, yet the StopReset.org website is revolutionary in what it offers theatregoers and the community at large with in-theater tweeting and live community discussions. What is your response to those who say that attending the theatre should be a static, as opposed to an interactive, experience that Stop.Reset provides?

RT: We continue to update the StopReset.org site. The audience gets to have the choice, according to their perspective. They can choose where they enter the play: before the show happens, while at the theater, and afterward. It’s organic in that it’s the melding of reality. We are meeting Chicago audiences on their own ground. Stop. Reset. is a piece about Chicago and the dialogue converges so the audience is a part of the play itself, wherever they are. I’m finding this liberating. I’m growing so much. 

BB: There were two Outside the Box events this week in which those involved with Stop. Reset. interacted directly with the Chicago community. What did you glean from those discussions?

RT: The symposia are about change. Everyone has been hit by technology in some way. Having these conversations with people from diverse backgrounds and to engage with artists around Chicago, professionals, and, importantly, students, that they take the themes of the play and create their own pieces and do it through their own medium: play, spoken word, music. All of that we’re doing in these live interactions.

A chord has to be struck that people need to be dealing with what is going on at this time. I don’t think we’ve seen such overall social and technological change since the 60s, when people were walking on the moon and sitting on the ground. All things are erupting at this moment. The LGBT community’s rights still, still gender, still race. Haven’t we been through this? When will we move forward? What do we need to move forward with? Do we cut away the ghosts and leave the past behind? What do we need to retain? What are the tools that we need to move forward?

BB: Stop. Reset. is, in part, about legacy. With your decades at the Goodman Theatre and as the only member of the theater’s Artistic Collective to generate work in all three creative capacities as playwright, director and actor, how are you defining your legacy and what advice could you give young Black women creating their own work?

RT: There is a passion and tenacity to it. A seeking of truth to it. An unstoppability in terms of claiming ground and being heard and being seen. To claim the ground that sheds light to your existence. That’s what my work is about, in terms of reaching out to the community to give platforms to people who would not have visibility. That Stop. Reset. is set in Chicago and my relationship to audiences who have witnessed these markers in my life. The challenge is to see how I can extend these portals of storytelling as an artist to work along with the community. It permeates every part of our lives. How to challenge audiences and interact with new audiences.

Regina Taylor is a Golden Globe and NAACP Image Award winner and two-time Emmy Award nominee currently starring in DIG, a new television series on USA Network. She was the first African American to play Romeo and Juliet’s title young lover on Broadway, and gained wide public recognition for her performance on the television series, I’ll Fly Away. Taylor’s latest stage production, Stop. Reset. can be seen at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre from May 23 – June 21.

The post Regina Taylor Examines Legacy & Digital Technology In Stop. Reset. appeared first on Broadway Black.

When his brother is shot, mentally disabled Langston Bellows (Gbenga Akinnagbe, The Wire) is left without a protector in Brooklyn’s housing projects. Now under the control of his abusive mother (Alfre Woodard, 12 Years A Slave) he must take his future into his own hands. Langston strives for independence from his prior life, from his mother, and from his fractured mind.

Woodard was last seen on Broadway in Regina Taylor’s Drowning Crow (the 2004 adaptation and updating of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull), opposite Anthony Mackie (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, A Behanding in Spokane), Aunjanue Ellis (Joe Turner’s Come And Gone, The Tempest), Ebony Jo-Ann (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Mule Bone, The Sunshine Boys, Gem of the Ocean), Stephen McKinley Henderson (King Hedley II, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, A Raisin in the Sun), and Tracie Thoms (Rent, Stick Fly). She made her professional theatre debut in 1974 at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. Her breakthrough role came three years later (1977) in the off-Broadway production of Ntozake Shange’s classic for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.

Alfre’s film and television career is vast and diverse. She won her Screen Actors Guild Award in 1995 for her work in the film version of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.

Knucklehead screens Thursday, March 26th at the Peter Jay Sharp Building BAM Rose Cinemas. To purchase tickets and get more information, CLICK HERE.

The post Alfre Woodard’s Back To NYC In ‘Knucklehead’ appeared first on Broadway Black.

The readings of all 10 of plays will now be streamed live and you can watch them here!

Join us for an historic series as an extraordinary cast of actors and directors — many who worked directly with Wilson — gather to make the first-ever recording of his celebrated 10-play cycle capturing 100 years of African American life in the 20th century.

The readings will feature many actors reprising the roles they performed on stage, including Tony Award winner LESLIE UGGAMS as Ruby in King Hedley II; Drama Desk and Obie Award winner ANTHONY CHISHOLM (Oz, Premium Rush) as Fielding in Jitney and Elder Barlow in Radio Golf; BRANDON DIRDEN (The Big C, House of Payne) in his Obie Award-winning role as Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson; RUSSELL HORNSBY (Grimm, Shameless) as King Hedley in King Hedley II; Emmy Award winner KEITH DAVID (Crash, Armageddon) as Seth Holly in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; EBONY JO-ANN as Ma Rainey in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; RUBEN SANTIAGO-HUDSON as Canewell in Seven Guitars; JOHN EARL JELKS as Sterling Johnson in Radio Golf; ROSLYN RUFF (Rachel Getting Married, The Help) as Berniece in The Piano Lesson, among others.

Other Wilson actors will take on new roles, including Tony Award nominee S. EPATHA MERKERSON (Law & Order, Lincoln) as Bertha in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and WENDELL PIERCE (Treme, The Wire) as Red Carter in Seven Guitars.

Academy Award nominee TARAJI P. HENSON (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Person of Interest) and JESSE L. MARTIN (Law & Order, Rent) will make their Wilson debuts as Molly Cunningham in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Lyons in Fences, respectively.

Check Back here to watch the reading recordings each week.

In the meantime listen to Ruben Santiago Hudson, Phylicia Rashad, and others talk about the legacy of August Wilson, read the cast lists for the recordings, and copy the schedule of the recording series below

SCHEDULE

All readings start at 7pm at The Greene Space, 44 Charlton Street (at Varick Street), Downtown Manhattan.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom– Monday, August 26
Directed by Ruben Santiago Hudson

David Margulies……………………………Sturdyvant
Tuck Milligan…………………………………….Irvin
Charles Weldon…………………………………Cutler
Clarke Peters…………………………………..Toledo
Harvy Blanks……………………………….Slow Drag
Ebony Jo-Ann…………………………..…Ma Rainey
Joniece Abbott-Pratt………………..…….Dussie Mae
Jonathan Majors………………………..…… Sylvester

Fences–Wednesday, August 28
Directed by Kenny Leon

Eugene Lee………………………………… Jim Bono
Jesse L. Martin………………………………….Lyons
Ray Anthony Thomas………………………….Gabriel
Jonathan Majors………………………………….Cory
Regina Taylor…………………………………….Rose

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone– Wednesday, September 4
Directed by Phylicia Rashad

Keith David…………………………….…..Seth Holly
Taraji P. Henson……………….… Molly Cunningham
S. Epatha Merkerson……………………. Bertha Holly
Roger Robinson……………………….……… Bynum
Raynor Scheine………………….……Rutherford Selig
Jason Dirden…………………….……..Jeremy Furlow
John Douglas Thompson……….……..Harold Loomis
January LaVoy………………….……Mattie Campbell
Nile Bullock………………….………Reuben Mercer
Alexis Holt…………………….………..Zonia Loomis

The Piano Lesson– Monday, September 9
Directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson

Brandon J. Dirden………………………….Boy Willie
Roslyn Ruff…………………………………..Berniece
Jason Dirden…………………………..……….Lymon
Alexis Holt…………………………..…………Maretha
Eric Lenox Abrams………………….……….….Avery
Chuck Cooper……………………….……Wining Boy
Mandi Masden……………………………..…….Grace

Two Trains Running– Wednesday, September 11
Directed by Michele Shay

Ron Cephas Jones……………………………….Wolf
James A. Williams………………………….Holloway
Owiso Odera………………………………….Sterling
Leon Addison Brown……………………….Hambone
Harvy Blanks…………………………………….West

Seven Guitars– Friday, September 13
Directed by Stephen McKinley Henderson

Ruben Santiago-Hudson…………………… Canewell
Wendell Pierce……………………….……Red Carter
Brenda Pressley…………………………………Louise
Lou Ferguson………………………………….Hedley
Harry Lennix……………………………Floyd Barton
Cassandra Freeman………………………………Ruby

Jitney– Monday, September 16
Directed by Ruben Santiago Hudson

Anthony Chisholm…………………………….Fielding
Amari Cheatom………………………….Youngblood
Stephen M Henderson…………………………Turnbo
Barry Shabaka Henley…………………………..Doub
Harvy Blanks…………………………………..Shealy
Joaquina Kalukango……………………………..Rena

King Hedley II– Saturday, September 21
Directed by Michele Shay

Russell Hornsby………………………King Hedley II
Leslie Uggams…………………………………..Ruby
Kevin Carroll……………………………………Mister
Stephen M. Henderson………………………..Elmore
Marsha Stephanie Blake………………………..Tonya
Arthur French……………………………Stool Pigeon

Gem of the Ocean– Tuesday, September 24
Directed by Kenny Leon

Eugene Lee…………………………………………Eli
Stephen Tyrone Williams……………..Citizen Barlow
Phylicia Rashad……………………………Aunt Ester
Danai Gurira………………………………Black Mary
Raynor Scheine………………………Rutherford Selig
Anthony Chisholm………………….Solly Two Kings
Keith Randolph Smith…………………………Caesar

Radio Golf– Saturday, September 28
Directed by Marion McClinton

Anthony Chisholm………….. ….Elder Joseph Barlow
John Earl Jelks………………………..Sterling Johnson
Rocky Carroll…………………………Harmond Wilks
Sharon Washington………………………Mame Wilks
James A. Williams……………………Roosevelt Hicks

The post You Have No Excuse: Don’t Miss August Wilson Cycle Recordings Live Stream appeared first on Broadway Black.

Through Residency Five and Signature Theatre, Regina’s first offering will be a play titled, “stop. reset.” 

I had the pleasure of speaking with Regina about “stop. reset.” and her residency at Signature Theatre. She shared that in her play, we follow ‘Alex Ames,’ the owner of Chicago’s oldest African-American book publishing company, on a day in which he is conducting interviews with all of his employees in an effort to see where he can “cut the fat.” In this constantly advancing technology-based generation, ‘Alex’ is forced to take stock of the publishing company he runs, as e-books seem to threaten to knock him out of the game. In an effort to keep his business afloat, he decides to interview his workers to see which of them are obsolete as he figures out how to adapt to the changing landscape. ‘Alex’ meets tech-savvy 19 year-old ‘J,’ a janitor at his company. ‘J’ is the youngest employee, by far, and from there the wheels begin to turn.

Regina informed me that identity is the central theme to “stop. reset.” and that she is honored to have had the opportunity to create this piece especially for Signature Theatre, in an attempt at drawing audiences with a story that “lives both on stage and online.” Over at StopReset.com the dialogue surrounding the play continues.When asked how her Blackness influenced her work, she made it clear that it wasn’t the sole influencing descriptor, and that it, coupled with her being female among other things influences her work because she “writes with (her) whole self.” She also talked about the group of actors cast to give life to her words, and beamed about how they reflect “the community I walk in,” what with them being African-American, Asian-American, white, Latino, etc.

I asked Regina how involved she was with the casting process and whether she liked it or not. She replied that as the writer and director the piece she is very hands on with the casting process, and enjoys it. The cast of “stop. reset.” includes Carl Lumbly (‘Jitney,’ TV’s’ ‘Alias’ and ‘Cagney and Lacey’), LaTanya Richardson Jackson (‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,’ ‘The Fighting Temptations’), Teagle Bougere (‘Wings,’ ‘A Raisin in the Sun’), and Ismael Cruz-Cordova (‘Sesame Street’).

“stop. reset.” is set to begin previews at The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre (at Signature Theatre) on August 20th, open officially on September 8th, and run (for now) until September 29th! This is a must see show! Make some time to head to the theatre and see this piece.

The post In Conversation: With Regina Taylor, Award-Winning Playwright And Actress appeared first on Broadway Black.

Broadway Black stars have shown up and show out this year!

Tony Award winner Tonya Pinkins (Caroline, or Change, Jelly’s Last Jam) is the 2013 celebrity co-chair, along with actor Dorien Wilson (The Parkers).  Pinkins will also perform her new solo show Tonya Pinkins: Unplugged.

Tony nominees S. Epatha Merkerson (Come Back, Little Sheba, The Piano Lesson) and Paul Tazewell (A Streetcar Named Desire, The Color Purple) are among the 2013 NBTF honorees

The legendary Tony Award winning Lillias White (Dreamgirls, Fela!) will perform BIG MAYBELLE: Soul of the Blues, written and directed by Paul Levine.

Two-time Tony Award nominee André De Shields (The Wiz, Ain’t Misbehavin’) will star in Woodie King Jr.’s New Federal Theatre production of Knock Me a Kiss.

Chester Gregory (Sister Act, Hairspray) is back with his new play The Eve of Jackie: A Tribute to Jackie Wilson.

Actor and Playwright Regina Taylor’s (I‘ll Fly Away, The Unit) gospel musical Crowns will be staged by the North Carolina Black Repertory Company

Rain Pryor will perform her off-Broadway hit Fried Chicken & Latkas.

The Negro Ensemble Company presents Women in the Pit starring the 2013 NBTF Sidney Poitier Lifelong Achievement Award Recipient Hal Williams (227, Sanford & Son).

Tony Award nominated Norm Lewis (Porgy & Bess, Les Misérables) and Hattie Winston (The Tap Dance Kid, Hair) are also in attendance along with many other film and television stars.

For more information about the National Black Theatre Festival visit: www.NBTF.org

We’re actually here at the festival this year and we’ll be bringing to reviews and sightings here! Check our instagram as well!

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