Event

DUTCHMAN by Amiri Baraka

Mixed Magic Theatre (MMT) is thrilled to open its season with Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and The Slave, two searing, timeless and timely dramas that will be performed in repertory in the company's two renovated performance spaces November 10 - 26, 2017.

Dutchman, which premiered in March 1964 and received an Obie Award for Best American Play, was Amiri Baraka's first foray into what he described as "action literature" and is considered a seminal work in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This production, directed by MMT Artistic Director Jonathan Pitts-Wiley, features Yakim Parker as Clay and Kerry Giorgi as Lula, a Black man and White woman whose brief, tense encounter "in the flying underbelly" of a New York City subway car is a tangle of flirtation, ugly truths, and palpable rage.

Baraka's writing deftly grapples with the tempestuous intersections of race, sex, class, and gender. At turns amusing, vulnerable and dripping with an unrelenting fury, Dutchman has left audiences breathless for over five decades and continues to crackle in today's climate rife with passionate debate on the nature of truth, freedom, and identity.