The Classical Theatre of Harlem

future classics 2008

CTH’s Future Classics Program is supported in part by The Ford Foundation.

Future Classics Reading | November 19, 2008 at 7pm

HALAL BROTHERS
By Aladdin Ullah
Directed by Christopher McElroen

The Schomburg Center - 515 Malcolm X Boulevard at 135th Street (2 or 3 train to 135th St.)

ADMISSION IS FREE

On February 25th, 1965 two immigrant Bengali brothers --owners of their very first Halal store in Harlem -- prepare a huge order for Malcolm X’s new congregation at the Audubon Ballroom.  The ensuing events take place during that fateful day between the two brothers. Each is at a crossroads. The older brother is intent on making his “American Dream” come true; the younger is struggling with his affection for his African-American tutor from City College.  

Aladdin Ullah (playwright) has been pioneering the past decade as one of the very first South Asians to perform stand-up comedy on National Television on HBO, Comedy Central, MTV, BET, and PBS. Co-founder and host of the ground breaking multi-ethnic stand-up show Colorblind, which Mel Watkins of the New York Times hailed as "hilarious, thought provoking and ground breaking."  Theater: Indio, directed by Loretta Greco (NY Works Now!-NYSF/Public Theater), Mike Batistic's Port Authority Throw Down (Culture Project),  Rain from Out of the Blue (NY Int'l Fringe fest). Workshops: NY stage and Film Fest, Second Stage, Ma-Yi, Lark Theater, Working Theater, and Cape Cod Theater Project. Television:  Law and Order, Uncle Morty's Dub Shack (IATV), Desis: South Asians in NY (PBS.) Aladdin is a current member of the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater and recipient of the IAAC (Indo American ARTS) residency at the Lark Theater. He is also the recipient of the Paul Robeson Development Grant.

Christopher McElroen (director) is the Co-Founder of the Classical Theatre of Harlem where he has helped produce thirty-six productions in the past seven years yielding 13 AUDELCO Awards, 5 OBIE Awards, 2 Lucille Lortel Awards, a Drama Desk Award and CTH being named "1 of 8 theatres in America to Watch" by the Drama League. As a director, he has helmed numerous productions at CTH including The Cherry Orchard with Earle Hyman, The Blacks: A Clown Show (4 OBIE Awards) and the post-Katrina inspired Waiting For Godot with Wendell Pierce, which was recently remounted outdoors in the Lower 9th Ward and Gentilly section of New Orleans. He also directed the international tour of Sekou Sundiata's 51st (Dream) State, which premiered at The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

Future Classics Reading | November 10, 2008 at 7pm

STEPCHILD:  Frederick Douglass & Abraham Lincoln
By David W. Blight and Peter Almond
Featuring Roger Guenveur Smith as Frederick Douglass
Directed by Alfred Preisser

Produced in association with The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, The Smithsonian Institute and Howard University.


The Schomburg Center - 515 Malcolm X Boulevard at 135th Street (2 or 3 train to 135th St.)

ADMISSION IS FREE

Stepchild is a tour de force one person play focusing on the complex and often conflicted relationship between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.  Douglass, perhaps the most powerful symbol and agent of the Abolitionist movement in America, and Abraham Lincoln, a U.S. President who found “greatness thrust upon him” had a profound and troubled relationship. In this play Lincoln has just been assassinated in the nation’s capitol; Douglass, nearing the end of his life, contemplates his life’s journey, his struggles with American culture and with Lincoln, and the true nature of their final friendship.

David W. Blight (playwright) is a Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University.  He is one of the nation's foremost authorities on the US Civil War and its legacy. Blight is the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007). He is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history.

Roger Guenveur Smith (Frederick Douglass) is an actor, writer, and director whose work has been internationally acclaimed. He created and performed the Obie Award-winning and adapted it into a Peabody Award-winning telefilm, directed by his longtime colleague, Spike Lee.  For Mr. Lee's Oscar-nominated DO THE RIGHT THING, Mr. Smith created the stuttering hero Smiley, one of many in a gallery of memorable characters for the stage and screen. Also among his historically-inspired performances are Frederick Douglass Now, Christopher Columbus 1992, and the award-winning duet Inside The Creole Mafia, a "not-too-dark comedy" in collaboration with New Orleans native Mark Broyard.  Mr. Smith also directed the distinguished performance trio Culture Clash in their Bessie Award-winning Radio Mambo. Roger's most recent work includes a new solo, The Watts Towers Project, and the Spalding Gray retrospective Leftover Stories To Tell, both cited among the best of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times; which inaugurated Harlem's new Gatehouse Theater. Roger co-stars with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington in Ridley Scott's Vietnam War era epic, American Gangster.

Alfred Preisser (director) is the Co-Founder of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, where he has created a wide and distinguished body of work noted for its physicality, originality, and use of music and dance.  His production of Melvyn Van Peebles' Aint Supposed To Die a Natural Death garnered seven AUDELCO Awards including Best Director, and his production of King Lear with André De Shields opened the 75th Anniversary season at The Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C.  He has created critically acclaimed adaptations of Medea, Electra, and Caligula for CTH. Other projects with CTH include Macbeth, which toured Germany in 2004, Hamlet, Day of Absence, Dream on Monkey Mountain, and Romeo and Juliet.  Most recently he directed Black Nativity, which starred André De Shields, at The Duke on 42nd Street Theater. 

Future Classics Reading | October 15, 2008 at 7pm

Katori Hall’s
Saturday Night Sunday Morning
Directed by Lydia Fort

The Schomburg Center - 515 Malcolm X Boulevard at 135th Street (2 or 3 train to 135th St.)

ADMISSION IS FREE

It's the final days of World War II, and the tenants of Miss Mary's Press& Curl, a beauty shop/boarding house for women, are waiting for their men to come home. Especially Leanne, an illiterate beauty queen hailing from Texas, who has waited years for her lover's letters that have yet come. Her dramatic antics have made the shop unpopular and the house "the last stopover fo' Hell!" But when a new boarder named Gladys, a church going Alabama secretary, moves in with a typewriter and the gift for words, the girls' worlds are turned upside down. Katori Hall's poignant new comedy is about love and awakenings in a changing time.

Katori Hall (playwright) is a playwright-performer hailing from Memphis, Tennessee.  Her plays include the critically-acclaimed Hoodoo Love (3 AUDELCO nominations, mentored by Lynn Nottage), Remembrance, Hurt Village, Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, The Mountaintop, On the Chitlin’ Circuit, and Freedom Train (KCACTF 10 minute play national finalist). Her work has been developed and presented at the following venues: the American Repertory Theatre, Kennedy Center, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classical Theatre of Harlem, BRICLab, Women’s Project, World Financial Center, Lark Development Center, New Professional Theatre, The O’Neill, Stanford University, and Columbia University. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Le Compte du Nouy Prize, North Manhattan Arts Alliance Fellowship, New York State Council on the Arts Commission Grant, New Professional Theatre’s Writers’ Festival award, Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting and Screenwriting, Royal Court Theatre Residency, and the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award. She has been a Kennedy Center Playwriting Fellow.  

Lydia Fort (director) most recently directed Adrienne Kennedy’s A Rat’s Mass, a musical version of Pinocchio and Sarah Hammond's Tell It Underwater at the Hangar Theatre.  Her New York directing credits include Paper Cuts for the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Enclosed Spaces at CAP 21, the solo show girls from the goddess womb as well as produced and directed Wines in the Wilderness.  For the Classical Theatre of Harlem she served as assistant director for Marat/Sade and King Lear and also directed a reading of Katori Hall's Hurt Village.  For the Ethnic Cultural Theatre in Seattle, where she served as Artistic Coordinator, she has directed Moon on a Rainbow Shawl and the Northwest premiere of Harvest.  Lydia was the SDCF Observer for the Broadway production of Spring Awakening directed by Michael Mayer. Lydia received her MFA from the University of Washington.  Her directing credits at UW include The Good Woman of Setzuan, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Stop Kiss, The Bald Soprano, Antigone, The Mystery at Twicknam Vicarage and The Heiress. She assisted Jon Jory on Igmar Bergman's Nora and assisted KJ Sanchez on Panaphobia.  Lydia is an Associate Member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers and is a New York Theatre Workshop Directing Fellow and a Drama League Fellow.

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Past participants in the program whose work has gone onto to full productions include:

Bashi Rose’s Forteez Bluntz Chickenhedz read as a CTH Future Classic in 2006 and produced at the HipHop Theatre Festival in 2007.

April Yvette Thompson’s Liberty City read as a CTH Future Classic in 2006 and produced at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2008.

Petronia Paley's On the Way to Timbuktu read as a CTH Future Classic in 2007 and produced at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in 2008.

Ty Jones’ Emancipation read as a CTH Future Classic in 2007 and produced at CTH in 2008.

Playwrights interested in participating in CTH’s Future Classics Program should email a cover letter and play description to [email protected].

Startlingly fresh . CTH reconfirms itself as one of the gutsiest and physically fearless groups around - David Cote, Time Out NY