The Black Space Plays (Part 3)

An Irons in the Fire Project

July 18, 2024 @ 4:00pm
Mai House Studio - 99 Canal St, New York, NY 10002

By a.k. payne
Directed by Cristina Angeles

Performed by:

Whitney Andrews
Tyler Cruz
Abigail C. Onwunali
Maleek Rae

Stage Manager: Hannah Sgambellone
Dramaturg: Anthony Holiday

Playwright

a.k. payne [she/they] is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their plays love on and engage the interdependencies of Black pasts, presents and futures and seek to find/remember language that might move us towards our collective liberations. They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from fka Yale School of Drama. Their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She is the current recipient of the Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, National Black Theatre's I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency, the Kemp Powers Commission Fund for Black Playwrights and Atlantic Theater Company's Judith Champion Launch Commission. Their work has been developed with the National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theater Conference, and Manhattan Theater Club's "Groundworks Lab." They are a proud graduate of Pittsburgh Public Schools; grandchild of the Great Migration; descendant of a music teacher and a carpenter, who both march every year with their unions in Pittsburgh's Labor Day parade; a queer & non-binary abolitionist affected in community by the 'New Jim Crow;" and of a great lineage of Black women storytellers and living-room archivists; all of which deeply informs, uplifts and amplifies their work as a playwright, community organizer and spacemaker.

CRISTINA ANGELES [she/her] is an Afrolatina director, writer, and theater maker who develops new plays, musicals, and socially conscious adaptations of classics that place women of color at the forefront, while confronting the intersections between our public, private, and political selves. She has been awarded the Drama League Directing Fellowship, the Roundabout Directing Fellowship, and has worked as an associate director on and off Broadway.

Today, Cristina is the Associate Resident Director at Roundabout Theatre Company, the Resident Director of SIX: The Musical, and the Founding Artistic Director of Checkmark Productions, an NYC based company dedicated to artists of color and the telling of their stories. Cristina was named one of the Broadway Women’s Fund’s “Women to Watch” of 2022, and her recent directing credits include Hilary Bettis’s Queen of Basel at Theaterworks Hartford, and overseeing the national tour of Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play directed by Kenny Leon.

More at www.cristinaangeles.com

Poster Sketch by Sean Devare
Image Concept by Susanna Hayward