Event

Warriors Don't Cry

The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts is proud to announce its national tour of WARRIORS DON'T CRY, sponsored by AETNA. An adaptation of the award-winning (American Library Association Award, 1995 Nonfiction Book of the Year; Robert F. Kennedy Book Award) memoir of the same name, authored by Dr. Melba Pattillo Beals, this newly produced one-woman performance comes to The Balch Street Theatre, 220 South Balch Street, Akron, OH, 44302 on January 17 and 18, 2013. Adapted by Zita Christian and Scott Galbraith, WARRIORS DON'T CRY recounts the story of one of the "Little Rock Nine." Fifteen-year-old Melba Pattillo of Little Rock, Arkansas endures violence and discrimination as she and eight other African-American students integrate Central High School in 1957. Directed by Richard C. Aven and performed by Almeria Campbell, the performance begins at 7:30 pm and is sponsored by Center for Applied Theatre and Active Culture (CATAC) and New World Performance Laboratory. This engagement is supported by the Arts Midwest Touring Fund, a program of Arts Midwest, is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts with additional contributions from the Ohio Arts Council. CATAC/NWPL's 2012-2013 season is supported in part by the Akron Community Foundation.

"When we started working on 'Warriors' over three years ago, we knew it could resonate within the broader discussion of the achievement gap in schools across the nation," said Scott Galbraith, vice president of programming, The Bushnell. "There was no way to predict its relevance to the current discussions about bullying, immigration, and similar headlines. That's just an amazing, and disturbing, coincidence."