EVERY 28 HOURS PLAYS National Theater Project

As part of the kick-off event for the 2016 Kennedy Center (KC) American College Theater Festival, a special preview of the EVERY 28 HOURS PLAYS will be performed and livestreamed as part of KC’s Millennium Stage Series. The preview consists of an excerpt of the collection with more than 30 one-minute plays inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, with participation by theater makers and institutions across the nation and showcases the creative outcome of a community outreach residency in Ferguson and St. Louis County, Missouri in the fall of 2015.  

Playwrights for this preview feature alumni of the Michael Kanin Playwriting Awards Program (Kirsten Greenidge, Ike Holter, Dominique Morisseau, Jerome A. Parker, Aurin Squire) and Kennedy Center Playwriting Guest Artists (Migdalia Cruz, Kristoffer Diaz, Idris Goodwin, Neil LaBute, Jacqueline E. Lawton, Lisa Loomer, Aaron Posner, Robert Schenkkan, Anu Yadav, and many others, including Colman Domingo, Psalmayene 24, David Henry Hwang, Tarell Alvin MacCraney, Universes, Keith Josef Adkins, Stew, Josh Wilder, and Lynn Nottage). These artists, along with other local, theater making luminaries. give their voices to stories of pain and perseverance in the face of death, rage in the heart of protest, and hope for a future that values black and other marginalized lives.   
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The EVERY 28 HOURS PLAYS continues this important human and civil rights conversation in a political season where the evolution of our policies, practices and mind-sets are at stake.  This event aims to serve as an important reminder of how theater arts can meld with activism and enact real change. To have these plays, followed by a conversation led by Thembi Duncan of Young Playwrights’ Theater, presented in front of students making their entry into the field of the performing arts and in the nation’s capital is one important goal for the producers and artistic collaborators involved in the project. 

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The culminating effect of The Every 28 Hours Plays as already performed in St. Louis, San Francisco and Providence, R.I., is a relentless one.  Once the plays start rolling out they do not quit - with a new play, idea, tone and view-point taking hold every minute and building on one another; even Nikole Salter’s haunting finale piece doesn’t shake off easily.   By the plays’ end an audience has been taken through a rollercoaster of emotions that raises consciousness and correctly hones in on the gravity of this issue. 
An acting company of 30 will present the work, drawn from leading actors from the professional DC theater community, including Tonya Beckman, Frank Britton, J.J. Johnson, Joy Jones, Christopher Lane, Jeff Kirkman, Manu Kumasi, Fatima Quander, and Justin Weaks, as well as students and alumni from Howard University, University of Maryland, Catholic University of America.

Click here to read the full press release and learn more. Watch online with us APRIL 12 at 6pm (EST). RSVP via our facebook event and the livestream can be viewed here.