Musicals

THE RIVER IS ME

Music by Troy Anthony

The River Is Me is a new original music theater ghost story inspired by all the lynched bodies of black boys that have been destroyed and discarded that we as a nation now must drink in time and time again from the very landscape beneath our feet. Bo–a 14 year old comic book loving smart aleck from Chicago–takes a trip in August, 1955 to spend the last week of his summer vacation on an adventure. When he tries to show off for his friends by whistling at a white woman, he is kidnapped, tortured and killed by her husband. Yet rather than disappear, Bo returns to walk the earth as a phantasm with water-based super powers like the hero he dreamed of when he was a living boy in order to keep safe the mother and the planet he leaves behind

AIN’T FAR FROM HOME

Music by Ben Krauss

1855-A slave drives a horse-drawn buggy taking her master back to their plantation where,  unbeknownst to the Lady of the house, a bloody slave uprising is planned for the evening; 1905–a black teenage cook wants to run off to vaudeville and the aging white actress that has been like a mother to her, using a pimp who shows up one day as her ticket off of her servant duties on a showboat; 1955–a black girl and white girl meet to play and giggle, pretending to run away from home, befriending a strange fourteen year old boy who claims he is a ghost, and suddenly the need to escape rural Alabama and the white girl’s father become anything but a game.  A 3-actor, 100 minute new original musical triptych and an exploration of race, class and black vs. white feminism in America, AIN’T FAR FROM HOME takes us on a journey in which a black woman and a white woman are reincarnated over a period of 150 years as they try to connect across boundaries of race in the American south, with uncertain destination, that asks us as an American people, “Where are we headed?”