Click here for BWPG's fundraiser on December 4th
Click here for BWPG's Fall 2011 Open House!
BWPG Partnership with StoryCorp.
BWPG is very proud of our partnership with StoryCorps, the national oral history project heard weekly on NPR. For the project, a StoryCorps team came to Washington to professionally record 26 senior citizens from the Brookland neighborhood who were interviewed by BWPG members. The interviews are catalogued in the Library of Congress and The Martin Luther King Library Washingtoniana Room.
The second part of the project focused on BWPG using the StoryCorps interviews as a springboard for a short film about the Brookland neighborhood. Two BWPG members learned how to write a screenplay and crafted Brookland, Not Brooklyn. With these new skills, they produced a screenplay based on the interviews with the senior citizens.
(click for larger photos)
Synopsis of Brookland, Not Brooklyn
Brookland, Not Brooklyn is about 8-year-old David, whose family is
firebombed out of their home in Montgomery, Alabama because his father, a
popular DJ, supports the Montgomery Bus Boycott on his radio program.
David adores his father and together they avidly follow Jackie Robinson.
The title springs from his confusion about where they are going when they
hurriedly leave Montgomery in the middle of the night for the safety of
Washington. He thinks his mother says they are going to Brooklyn, and, of
course, he thinks he is on his way to see the Dodgers.
He arrives at his grandmother’s house in Brookland and has difficulty
adjusting. His father decides he has to go back to Montgomery to continue
to help the boycott, which really frightens David even more. On the
surface David is full of boyish bravado and applauds his father’s return.
However, he is traumatized by the fire and his father’s pending return to
danger, and begins to play with matches, throw a book at his teacher, and
sass adults. His father decides not to return to Montgomery, and draws his
son to him, explaining that you can be an activist wherever you are, and
there’s plenty for the two of them to change here in DC. The film ends
with excerpts from the StoryCorps interviews, archival shots of Brookland
in the 50’s and footage of the historic 1968 Brookland protest, which
stopped a new freeway from going through the neighborhood.
BWPG/Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center’s Cyber Narrative Project Meets in Pittsburgh
On September 1st, 2011, theaters and playwrights met at
Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) to launch the
Cyber Narrative Project. Linked to live performance in the 12-13 season, playwrights
will writing additional content centered on plays produced at theaters across
the country, for which ETC will design a digital environment. Playwrights
include: Kristoffer Diaz, The Eternal Entrance of Chad Deity; Chinaka
Hodge, Mirrors In Every
Corner; and Harrison Rivers, Look Upon Our Lowliness. Theaters attending
the meeting included: Dallas
Theater Center,
Hip Hop Theater Festival, Intersection for the Arts, The Movement Theatre, Penumbra
Theatre, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre.
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| Playwright Kristoffer Diaz, The Eternal Entrance of Chad Deity, Woolly Mammoth Theatre and Dallas Theater Center. | (Left to right) Playwright Harrison Rivers, Look Upon Our Lowliness, Eric Lockley and David Mendizabal, Artistic Directors, The Movement Theatre. | 
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| Playwright Chinaka Hodge, Mirrors In Every Corner | Conference participants listen to Penumbra Artistic Associate Dominic Taylor, who skyped into the meeting. |
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| Miriam Weisfeld, Director of Artistic Development at Woolly Mammoth Theatre and Cylde Valentin, Artistic Associate, Hip Hop Theater Festival. | BWPG Member Mary Stone Hanley (left) listens as ETC Executive Producer Don Marinelli makes a point about digital media in the 21st century. |
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| Clyde Valentin, Associate Artistic Director, Hip Hop Theater Festival (left) and Kristoffer Diaz, The Eternal Entrance of Chad Deity (right). | Sean San Jose, Program Director, Theater, Intersection for the Arts |
BWPG Partnership with Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center.
In 2008, BWPG held the first national meeting of women of color writing drama in
Chicago. In that setting, women playwrights identified three areas of
interest: digital media, university residencies and productions, and the
world of presenters. BWPG decided to explore the first of these areas of
interest -- digital media. In Chicago, in April 2010, we convened Linking
Platforms: Theater and Digital Media in the 21st Century, from which
this project sprang.
Following its April 2010 conference, Linking Platforms: Theater and Digital Media in the 21st Century, BWPG designed a content and delivery program centered on theater production and its expansion into a digital format, and partnered with Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. The project design included a group of six individual theaters, creating three, two-partner teams. The partner theaters will choose three plays to be produced in the 2012-13 season. It is important that the play be a natural fit for each theater, that with or without this project, it is a play they would have inherently selected for their audiences. The plays must be by living playwrights. The selected playwrights will write scenes, monologues, and characters that are extensions of world of the primary plays. This additional content will be made available online in an interactive environment in a model created by the computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.
Because the project is artist-centered, BWPG approached theaters that have been at the vanguard of supporting new plays and playwrights. Those theaters included members of the honorary committee formed in support of its First National Meeting of Women of Color Writing Drama in Chicago in 2008. Theaters that expressed interest in the project included: Intersection for the Arts, Steppenwolf, Victory Gardens, Penumbra, Theater, The Movement Theater, Hip Hop Theater Festival, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre.
We met at Carnegie Mellon with all of the theaters and the CMU faculty in March. In June, we held two workshops, one in DC at Woolly Mammoth and the other in Chicago, led by CMU Professor Chris Klug. Chris taught 52 playwrights, from across the country, a common vocabulary for writing cyber narratives!
For information on future workshops, email: info@blackwomenplaywrights.org or call (202) 635-2974