No Dream Deferred presents a Drapetomania Pre-Show Talk livestreaming on the global, commons-based, peer-produced HowlRound TV network on Friday 31 March 2023 at 5 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 7 p.m. CDT (New Orleans, UTC -5) / 8 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4).
This is a special pre-show talk before opening night with the playwright of Drapetomania: A Negro Carol, M. D. Schaffer, and director, David Koté, facilitated by A Scribe Called Quess?
A Scribe Called Quess? is a poet, educator, actor, playwright, and activist. A two-time national poetry slam champion (2010, 2013), he has produced two books of poetry: Blind Visionz and Sleeper Cell, for which he has also published a curriculum in use in high schools. He is a CAC Distillery residency recipient, where he workshopped his first play, Crossroads, and a founder of Take ’Em Down NOLA, a coalition whose work removed several white “supremacist” symbols in New Orleans. He is lead artist and co-producer of award-winning film Many Fires This Time: We the 100 Million.
M. D. Schaffer (they/they) is a queer, non-binary, African American writer born in Houston, Texas and currently residing in New York City. Their previous works include F***in’ Howard Phillips with the JaYo Théâtre Company, Hotel On Fremont at the Lewis Center for the Arts, and A Rodeo Clown with the Obsidian Theatre Festival. They received their BA in anthropology at Princeton University and their MFA in musical theatre writing at New York University – Tisch. Their works examine the relation between Americana historical romanticism and American contemporary reality.
About the Play
Confronted with the devastating reality of police brutality and institutionalized racism, interracial couple Maggie and Wayne must face what it means to raise a Black child in today’s landscape. Battles arise when the ghosts of L. D. Barkley, Anna J. Cooper, and John Brown recruit Wayne to become a modern-day African American civil rights leader, as bigoted and bitter Samuel Cartwright desperately fights for the reinstatement of chattel slavery. As the chaos ensues, the characters are suddenly challenged with their fictionality, begging the question: Who and what has the power to control and resist?
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