Raekwon Fuller, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) from Anderson, South Carolina, credits acting with giving him a community in his hometown, where he often didn’t feel welcome as a gay black man.

A’ryee McGirt, an FCLC senior from Hollis, Queens, didn’t join the theater program until her sophomore year but has since seen her love for acting grow.

And Katie Heaton, an FCLC senior and a Brooklyn native who briefly rebelled against the field her father found success in as a playwright, has since fallen in love with set design.

Each of these students has a  lead role in La Cocina, the final mainstage show of the year by Fordham Theatre. The play, which is directed by Alex Shaw and written by interim director of playwriting Tony Meneses, was inspired by Arnold Wesker’s 1957 production The Kitchen. It tells the story of the back of the house of a New York City restaurant kitchen, where cooks and waitstaff juggle orders, dishes, and their own dreams of a better life. The production opened on April 13 and runs through April 22,

Fuller, who coincidentally plays a character named Ray, said the show–his last at Fordham since he is a senior—  is the culmination of a time of real-life self-exploration for him.

“When I was in high school, I found fellow African American students in the theater program, and they really helped me cultivate my self-love,” he said.

“I’ve been trying to continue that through Fordham by exploring the depths of my sexuality, my personality, and my Blackness, and really trying to incorporate that into any artistic process that I’m in.”

In Ray, he found a character who is a leader and stands up for his community, he said. Fuller has fewer lines than in previous mainstage roles, which he actually views as an opportunity for growth.

“What makes a successful actor is no matter how big or small your line is, you’re going out there like you were given the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech by Martin Luther King,” he said.

When McGirt first enrolled at Fordham, she commuted over an hour from Queens. Unlike peers who’d auditioned for the program their senior year in high school, she spent that year as an undecided major. She successfully auditioned her sophomore year.

“Growing up, I didn’t have that much exposure to theater, so I’m very thankful I’ve been able to study a lot of classical and contemporary plays. My love for theater has just grown,” she said.

In La Cocina, McGirt has her first big role as Monique, who is a new manager of the kitchen. The job is actually a step down for Monique, which makes the character more complex, and for  McGirt, also more appealing.

“I love that Monique is a leader. No one really teaches her anything; she’s kind of just thrown into this chaos and she has to work with what she has,” she said.

Heaton, a double major in theater and visual arts, said she was drawn to La Cocina as a set designer because it’s a contemporary production that deals with today’s issues.

“There is something exciting about being able to really explore current themes with social justice,” she said.

After working on smaller shows, it’s her first opportunity to supervise a mainstage production. In this case, that meant the construction of a lifesize, industrial kitchen.

“I’m grateful for it because it’s made me feel a lot more prepared for the actual world of set design,” she said.

Meneses, the playwright, said working with students has made the play better.

“A play is such a collaborative thing, where you have this version in your head of how a line may sound or how a moment may look,” he said.

“What’s fun is when an actor or director or designer does something so unexpected and different than what you thought it was, and it’s actually better.”

La Cocina continues with shows at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 19 through Friday, April 21, and 2 and 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 22.

—Video by Taylor Ha

God of Vengeance was written in 1906 in Yiddish, and after great success in Europe, it was translated into English, and performed on Broadway in 1923. The plot, which revolves around a love story between a woman prostitute and the daughter of a brothel owner, did not sit well with the authorities, however, and Asch was arrested.

Director Julie Kramer, who made her Fordham debut when the curtain on the production rose on Feb. 23, was moved by Indecent when she saw it on Broadway in 2017, but didn’t realize just how relevant it is to the current climate.

“What’s stunning about God Of Vengeance is how modern it feels. The way it portrays two women; it’s just stunning. I’m older than the students, but I still think of when it starts, in 1906, as being so long ago,” said Kramer, is helming the production as a guest director for Fordham Theatre.

“Then you read this, and you realize that this play was a huge hit all throughout Europe. It’s both fascinating and discouraging the ways that we sort of have to keep fighting for the same battle of representation and truth telling.”

The students have shown not only to be talented and dedicated, but also very connected to the show’s material, she said. The response from the audience has also been heartening.

“It is fascinating to me watching the play in the audience with so many students,” she said.

“In the very beginning, the playwright’s wife says ‘It’s the 20th century, you know? Everyone’s attracted to both sexes.’ It gets a huge laugh, which surprises me. But I think there’s something just incredibly delightful and surprising to this audience hearing that people fought about that in 1908.”

Indecent finishes with three more performances from March 2-4.

Bubnis, who assumed the role last year, said it wasn’t really a hard call.

“As artists, our students are resilient and have the skill set to adjust and adapt accordingly. I felt it was important for our collective morale to forge ahead with the season. Our mainstage season is one of our anchors that we build our year upon and keeping it intact as everything around us was changing so rapidly was important to us,” she said.

“I wanted us to face the challenges of the semester head-on. That meant pushing through and finding solutions. Going off the grid is not what the spirit of the theatre and our program is about. The show must always go on,” she said, adding that most of the program’s classes are being offered in a hybrid online/in-person format.

And so, on Oct. 8 at 8 p.m., the department will kick off a season titled “Into the Unknown” with a virtual production of Jaclyn Backhaus’ Men on Boats. The show, which will be directed by Sarah Elizabeth Wansley, will run on Zoom for three nights, free of charge. It will be followed in November by a virtual production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In the spring, productions of Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes and Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will follow.

Many of the theater program’s fall classes will revolve around the mainstage season, with professors using remote learning—and remote performances—as a way to explore important elements of acting and collaboration.

Connecting to Each Other Through Screens

Dawn Saito, an artist-in-residence who teaches Acting 1 and Movement for Actors, said she has had success on Zoom teaching the Laban movement analysis, a method and language used for describing, visualizing, interpreting, and documenting human movement.

“I have many exercises for opening up the body so the actor can transform into different characters, textures, and colors,” she said.

“They have enough room to be able to inhabit these images that I prompt them with.”

Scene work between two actors can be a challenge when a student is not in the same physical space as their partner, but that too can be overcome. During class, Saito sends students to breakout rooms, where they work together to listen and respond to each other.

In the exercise, one actor will move while the other remains frozen. The actor that is frozen will then respond to the movement of the one who is moving. After practicing with each other, they rejoin the larger group and share their progress. (To see movement pieces created by Saito’s students during quarantine last spring, click here.)

“A much as possible, I’m asking actors to radiate their energy, so that they’re connecting to their partners through the screen,” Saito said.

To create the appearance of action, students have practiced “handing” a cup of tea to one another by moving it toward the camera, and when they move their hand, the person on the other side will seemingly receive it. Because students are learning how to engage in their whole body, she isn’t worried that it’ll be difficult to transition back to in-person acting once the pandemic has subsided. In any case, actors have a primal need to be heard, she said, regardless of the platform.

“Art is necessary, especially in challenging times. People need an outlet, they need to see their stories told, and the cathartic process is healing,” she said.

Reflecting on Different Aspects of Theater

Michael Zampelli, S.J., an associate professor of theater who moved to Fordham this year from Santa Clara, is one of three professors teaching theater history this semester. His class which meets both online and in-person, focuses on the purpose of theater.

His class gives students a chance to reflect not only on what people thought of the theater historically and how it functions in society, but also what is happening to them right now, he said.

“It’s encouraging a sort of self-implicating reflection on what they do in a way that I don’t think would have been the case if we were doing this pre-Covid. Even though you hoped they were asking themselves questions like ‘How this is affecting me?’ and ‘How are we learning about how theater companies form?’—you could always have not gone down that road,” he said.

“Now it’s much harder to not go down that road, precisely because they’re responsible for generating theater during a time of great upheaval. The questions are not theoretical questions.”

Raekwon Fuller, a second-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, created this piece, which is meant to evoke what it feels like to be in Fuller’s universe, for Dawn Saito’s Movement for the Actor”class.

Learning to Speak the Same Language

Ntokozo Fuzunina Kunene, a designer who joined the faculty last year, has been teaching the class Theater Collaboration remotely from her native Johannesburg in South Africa. The class, which she co-teaches with acting program head Matthew Maguire, helps future directors, playwrights, designers, and actors speak to each other more effectively.

“I’m a costume designer, but I can’t necessarily think in terms of lighting, so I still want to make sure that I’m able to communicate with the light designer, because so much of our work impacts each other,” she said.

“When they say, ‘Oh, this is too bright,’ I need to be able to understand how to help reduce the brightness. Maybe something that the actor is wearing is too white. So how do we work together to combat that?”

To achieve that, the class is structured around productions that students from different theater tracks, such as acting and design, are invited to create independently based on prompts, which range from lengthy conversations that Kunene and Maguire record in advance to simple five-word poems.

Let’s Be More Limber

Clint Ramos, the head of the Design and Production track, changed the syllabi in his classes so that instead of working on several projects, students are focusing on one mainstage production for the whole semester.

Rather than adapting traditional theater to the current circumstances, he sees students innovating to create a new form. When you stage a production via Zoom, for instance, it’s worth investigating what it means to say that characters in a play are together in a specific room.

“Does it mean the actors are using the same background? The same lighting?” he said.

“For designers, that bridge already existed, because a lot of the designs are also created for film. This gave us an opportunity to lean in on that bridge. We’ve kind of overlooked this because we were so into live performance. We’re saying, let’s be more limber and see that you can do. The more limber the students become, the more possibilities they have for the future.”

Ramos has also enlisted five university theater programs in the Northeast for an online production stemming from themes in One Flea Spare, a 1995 play by Naomi Wallace set in a plague-ravaged London during the 17th century. Students are virtually attending classes at other universities and are collaborating with each other on works connected to the play. When it is finished, the recordings will live on a website hosted by Fordham.

Liliana Gutierrez, a second-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, created this piece, which is meant to evoke what it feels like to be in Gutierrez’ universe, for Dawn Saito’s Movement for the Actor class.

What Will ‘the Biz’ Look Like?

Theater is also big business, and that business is facing hard times; Broadway has been dark since March. Students who took Theater Management with Stephen Sosnowski, FCLC ’03, normally attended class at his office in Times Square. Sosnowski is senior vice president at SpotCo, where he has spearheaded advertising campaigns for more than 50 Broadway shows and cultural institutions.

His first remote class featured guest speaker Matt Ross, creator of the COVID-19 Theater Think Tank, which is working on processes for theaters to reopen safely. Sosnowski was reticent about the class at first but said he felt optimistic by the energy students brought to the meeting.

“I got a little emotional at the end of the class. These students coming to class; I’m in awe of them, frankly,” he said.

He admitted it’s impossible to predict with certainty what the industry will look like when it emerges from the pandemic. But he’s tried to provide a window into that future, through guest speakers such as Victoria Bailey, executive director of the Theater Development Fund; and Adam Siegal, managing director of Lincoln Center Theater.

“Everything I talk about is, ‘What was it like pre-March 12, and what do we think it’ll look like and what will the opportunity be like,’” he said.

“The key word is opportunity. I see this as a time where there’s a lot of opportunity to enact change. We can figure that out together.”

For a “backstage” tour of Men on Boats by senior Chloe Rice, visit the theatre department’s Instagram page.

Look a little closer though, and it’s possible to see in the season, which also features productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Airline Highway by Lisa D’Amour, and To The Bone by Lisa Ramirez, the ideas percolating through the atmosphere of these United States, circa 2019.

“[Students] are going to tackle all sorts of issues. Some are old, some are new, but they still pertain to what’s going on today,” said Stefanie Bubnis, the program’s interim managing director, who noted that every play features a large cast of lead characters. “It’s all about unity, working together, and symbiotic relationships.”

The season opens with The Wolves, an all-female ensemble play that debuted off-Broadway in 2016 and was a finalist a year later for a Pulitzer for drama. Set in an indoor soccer facility, it depicts nine teenage girls warming up for a game. Through their conversations, ideas emerge about personal and global events, raw and open wounds, and the struggle to rise above the pressures put upon them by men, coaches, peers, and society. To prepare for their roles, the cast has been meeting on a regular basis with Fordham’s own women’s soccer team.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will, which opens Nov. 6 and is considered to be one of the Bard’s funniest plays, was written 416 years ago, but it touches on some of the same issues of gender identity being debated today. In fact, when it was first staged, the character of Viola, who disguises herself as a boy and assumes the name Cesario, was played by a male actor.

In the spring, the program will break new ground when it comes to gender roles with the presentation of Airline Highway. Set at the Hummingbird Motel on the outskirts of New Orleans, the dark comedy features a group of outcasts who are throwing a funeral party for Miss Ruby, an 85-year-old former stripper who isn’t dead yet.

One of the lead characters is transgender, and if the right person is not found within the Fordham community, the casting will be opened up to the public, which would be a first for the theater program.

The final play, To The Bone, touches on the issue of immigration, as it focuses on undocumented workers who labor in a poultry factory in upstate New York.

The season’s plays were chosen in consultation with students in the theater program. Olivia Spenard, a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who nominated The Wolves, saw it when it was staged in 2017 at the Lincoln Center Theater, and chose it in part because it presents a rare portrait of women who draw strength through sports. She noted that Sarah DeLappe, the playwright, has compared the characters to warriors.

“So often, young women have roles that are much smaller in plays, or are some sort of stereotype or aggrandized characteristic of what a young woman should be. But The Wolves very unapologetically looks at what it means to be a young woman today and is an incredible ensemble play,” Spenard said.

“Their conversations are that of a girl growing up and coming into womanhood, whether she’s ready to or not.”

Fordham Theatre 2019-2020 Mainstage Productions:

The Wolves, by Sarah DeLappe, directed by Alicia House

October 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, directed by Sherri Eden Barber

Nov. 6, 7, 8, 14, 15, 16

Airline Highway by Lisa D’Amour, directed by Nehprii Amenii

Feb. 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28

To the Bone by Lisa Ramirez, directed by Lou Moreno, Artistic Director of INTAR

April 1, 2, 3, 16, 17, 18

Visit the Fordham Theatre Mainstage Season website for showtimes and more information.

In Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play, the final production of Fordham Theatres’ mainstage season, the answer for survivors of an apocalyptic event is an episode The Simpsons. In particular, the strangers bond over a retelling of Cape Feare, which first aired in October, 1993 and focuses on the family’s flight to escape the wrath of Sideshow Bob, a reoccurring character voiced by Kelsey Grammer.

Written by Anne Washburn, the play debuted in 2012, and enjoyed a three-month run at New York’s Playwright Horizons in 2013. Elizabeth Margid, head of directing at Fordham Theatre, saw it then with lighting and set design professor Chad McCarver, and was immediately smitten.

Each Act Like Its Own Play

Part of the appeal was the play’s unconventional format. The first act is set in an unspecified moment in the future after an event that has knocked out all power and plunged the country into chaos. The second act is seven years later, and the final act takes place 75 years after that.

“The first act is quite naturalistic, and the second starts to incorporate some elements of sit com acting and commercials, because the characters who meet in the first act form a theater that goes from remote outpost to remote outpost to perform Simpsons episodes. Seventy-five years later, we’re in a completely new theater company that’s turned this episode into a mythic, almost like Medieval pageant play,” she said.

Margid describes that final act as a “mash-up of Greek theater, Medieval pageant play, hip-hop, and music video.”

“It’s jaw-droppingly theatrical. And odd. And I was grabbed by the style, the form and the themes of the piece. I couldn’t predict what was going to happen next in this crazy piece, and I loved that. It was unlike anything I’ve seen before,” she said.

Reimagining Classics for Current Times

The material will be familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with the show, but hardcore Simpsons’ fans will be disappointed if they’re expecting a simple live-action re-enactment of Cape Feare. Because it’s set in a time when no one has access to television anymore, recollections are subject to characters’ memories.

“It’s a game of telephone over 75 years. So what you end up with is a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory. The theater company that creates this piece also decides to merge the plot elements with the apocalyptic disaster of the meltdown of nuclear plants that happened 75 years ago when the grid went down,” Margid said.

Just as works of art from the past are reinterpreted with current cultural concerns, so too is Cape Feare transformed into a mythic story about survival, going so far as to replace Sideshow Bob with Mr. Burns, another reoccurring character and owner of a nuclear power plant, as the main villain.

Channeling a Character’s Growth

Ella Stoller, a junior at Fordham College Lincoln Center who plays a survivor in the first two acts and a chorus member in the third, studied the play last year in a text analysis class. A big challenge for her is imagining how her character might evolve during the seven-year interlude between acts one and two. The stakes are much higher in the second, and yet at one point, the survivors take a break from rehearsing to debate how many cans of Diet Coke still exist.

“On the page, it’s this hilarious bit. Like, are they really gone? Who knows? But then you dig into it, and like there’s all the subtext about the different relationships and the fact that we’re in Oklahoma, it’s 3 p.m., we’re in a warehouse and it’s 90 degrees. And if we don’t get this show put together by the end of the night, our show tomorrow will fail and we won’t eat and we might not be safe or have a place to sleep,” she said.

To prepare for their roles, Margid also had two of Stoller’s colleagues watch the episode Homer the Heretic. While they faced the screen, she sat with her back to it, and was only allowed to turn around periodically to watch it, for ten second intervals. The point was to appreciate how fickle memory can be.

“Jenny and Matt got to watch the whole thing, so they had bigger chunks of it, but there were moments where I heard something that they hadn’t picked up on because they were watching it, so I got a word or a phrase or a sound effect that neither of them remembered. That drove forward our act,” she said.

Post Apocalyptic Fashion Trends

Staging is unique to the play as well, especially the clothes and masks used in the third act. Costume designer Siena Zoë Allen, FCLC ’15, worked with Margid in 2016 on the mainstage production of White People, and returned again to work with her alma mater.

Since there’s no way to know how much of society has been rebuilt 75 years later, it was decided that plastic—in the form of sheets, bags, bottles and wrappers—would be the backbone of their sartorial choices. Suffice to say, there are few manuals for making clothes with that material.

“If you iron a bunch of plastic bags to make a very long sheet of fabric and clothes, it doesn’t behave the way normal fabric should. When you put it on a body, it doesn’t bend, it doesn’t fold, it’s not graceful. So it’s been a very large learning process for all of us,” she said.

“It’s very different than fitting for a normal show, where if pants don’t fit, we can let them out with fabric that already exists. We are in charge of making the fabric, fitting the fabric, and making sure it matches the rest of what’s already been made. We can’t just start from scratch, so we do have to sort of adjust. It’s been fun.”

For Margid, the takeaway from the play is that art in general, and story-telling in particular, is not a luxury, but is in fact deeply entwined with the survival of the human spirit.

“At the absolute core of this piece, is a kind of Valentine to the power of theater to bind us together in dark times and to provide a place for collective emotion and reflection,” she said.

Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play, runs at Pope Auditorium April 10, 11, 12, 24, 25, 26 at 7:30 p.m. and April 27 at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at the theatre website.

That’s the conundrum of Fordham Theatre’s 2018/2019 mainstage season, which opens on October 4 with a contemporary translation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Director Matthew Maguire said that since American politics and culture is in the same state of chaos as it was last year, this was the right time to ditch formal themes, such as last years’ questions of American identity, and Fordham’s outsider roots the year before.

“I got tired of season titles that felt like rhetoric; I couldn’t think of a better title for this year’s season that was substantially different from last year’s,” he said.

Given all that has happened in the last year, Maguire said he felt it was necessary to be smarter and savvier in how plays were selected. Each one is in some way a resistance to a vision of the United States as a country that is nationalist, xenophobic, and dominated exclusively by heterosexual white Christians, he said. The works do share a common thread though: What happens when radical change disrupts to heretofore stable systems?

Antigonick, which was chosen with the November elections in mind, asks what happens when a young woman defies rigid state power. Orlando, a dreamy adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, asks what happens when a man is suddenly transformed into a woman. Satellites is set in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood and features a multi-racial couple struggling to answer the question, what happens when cultures clash?

The season ends with Mr. Burns, a musical set in the aftermath of an unspecified apocalyptic event. The survivors bond over a shared love of The Simpsons episode Cape Feare, and eventually build a tradition around staged reenactments of it. It is, Maguire said, an attempt to answer the question, ‘What happens if people have to rebuild their culture through the art they make?’

“It’s a wonderfully dual question because it says something to the theater makers about the importance of what that they do, but it also says something to audience about how story telling can bind a culture, and how the stories that are meaningful to them will protect them or divide them,” he said.

As is the Fordham Theatre program’s custom, students played a major role in choosing the plays. William Recce, a senior playwriting major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, participate in the five forums, and made a strong case for Mr. Burns inclusion. He’d been a fan of it since it debuted in 2012, partly because of its realistic depiction of the power of pop culture. It also resonated on a deeply personal level, he said, because it’s ultimately about collaboration and making art in trying times.

“For a theater program that is all about collaboration and building something from the ground up and sifting through the ashes of our everyday world and trying to find something beautiful, I thought, it’s a perfect piece,” he said.

Ultimately, Maguire said he hopes the plays are a positive means of resistance. For those who embrace xenophobia, racism, and nationalism, they’re meant to show there’s another way. For those who already embrace an inclusive vision of the country, they’re meant to be nourishing. Either way, they should make people think, and ideally take action.

“Plays should change people’s lives. You should walk out of a theater, and something should make you decide, ‘I think I’m going to do this,’ he said.

“If it doesn’t change your life, we have not done our job.”

The plays include:

Antigonick by Ann Carson, directed by Rebecca Martínez

Oct. 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12

Orlando by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Ashley Brooke Monroe

Nov. 7, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17

Satellites by Diana Son, directed by Sonoko Kawahara

Feb. 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, March 1

Mr. Burns, by Anne Washburn, directed by Elizabeth Margid

April 10, 11, 12, 24, 25, 26, 27

Director and associate professor of theatre Daniel Alexander Jones offers an inside look at the upcoming performances.

Tell us about The Owl Answers.

DANIEL ALEXANDER JONES: Owl Answers was written in the early 1960s. It’s a play about a young black woman named Clara Passmore who is trying to reconcile an identity that has been fragmented by her conflicts around race. She is trying to get access to the body of her dead father, “the richest white man in the town,” but she is deemed a “bastard” and denied entry by three ghostly apparitions from English history—William the Conqueror, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. The play theatricalizes Clara’s mind as she tries to reconcile the warring aspects of her identity and her experience in society.

Each actor plays several characters. How do these multiple identities function in the story?

DAJ: Kennedy depicts something we all feel: within one person are many states of mind. We walk around with different selves, different parts of our own experience, and different people who have influenced us. Kennedy is able to articulate the vast, complex inner world that we all possess in the midst of a chaotic outer world … The play is quite beautiful and the writing is incredibly lyrical. It makes us feel as if we’re living inside of a dream.

Tell us about the second of Kennedy’s plays, Sun.

DAJ: Kennedy was commissioned to write Sun after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965. The play was written as a monologue, but we’ve decided to stage it with three actors playing three different aspects of Malcolm. One actor plays Malcolm during his Nation of Islam years; another plays him during his hajj to Mecca; and the final actor is Malcolm on the day of his assassination … the monologue reflects the splitting of his consciousness into different parts.

The students give fantastic performances. It challenges them because it’s such a different style of acting. The best way to describe it is learning classical music versus learning jazz. We’re asking them to play jazz. But every one of them has been incredibly courageous in dealing with these works. One hopes that the students here who are learning their craft have opportunities to stretch themselves in a number of different directions, and this is an unusual play to do in a college setting, not because of its subject matter, but because of its style.

How do these plays confront current issues about racial justice?

DAJ: These themes are incredibly timely. Both plays speak to our country’s continued struggle to reconcile with our history and with its psychological and spiritual impact. Something as violent and potent as an assassination of a figure—like Malcolm X—is, to me, a correlate to the many highly publicized killings we’ve witnessed these last few years. The plays speak to our inability to make ourselves whole as a nation.

On March 3 you are hosting a free reading of Kennedy’s autobiography. Can you tell us more about that event?

DAJ: We’re doing a reading from her autobiography, People Who Led to My Plays, to both celebrate Kennedy and acknowledge the book’s [29th anniversary] reprinting. The book is a collection of short entries based on everything and everyone who inspired and shaped her as a writer, including people, characters, films, pieces of music, and political and historical figures.

The reading will be performed by four New York-based performers: Obie Award-winner Eisa Davis; Rhonda Ross, [who is the daughter of Diana Ross and Berry Gordy]; Stacey Robinson; and Helga Davis.

I consider Adrienne Kennedy to be the theater equivalent of Jackson Pollock in painting and Miles Davis in music. She is one of our most important playwrights in experimental dramatic structures, and her writings are artistically rigorous as she deals with some of our deepest traumas as a country.

Performances are Feb. 24, 25 and 26, and March 3, 4, and 5. All performances are at 8 p.m. in the Pope Auditorium.

Visit the theatre program’s webpage for details about tickets and the special events and lectures occurring alongside the production.

“A Season at the Mountaintop,” which takes as inspiration Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, opens with Kia Corthron’s Force Continuum on Oct. 8. It’ll be followed by Ji Junxiang’s The Orphan of Zhao, a joint production with the Ma-Yi Theater Company in November; The Owl Answers by Adrienne Kennedy in February; and White People by J.T. Rogers in April.

Theatre program director Matthew Maguire said the unrest in Ferguson last year in the aftermath of the shooting death of Brown personally affected him, as his family hails from St. Louis. In workshops with students last year, the theme of police brutality also kept surfacing, so when it came time to pick four plays, Maguire decided to expand the conversation.

King’s speech, about a vision in which God has allowed him to scale a mountain to see the Promised Land that we will reach, with or without him, made an ideal starting point.

“It made sense to me that if we put together a season in which our community, our students, and the people in our neighborhood were putting up a different vision than one of violence— imagining a place in which everyone was included—then we might be able to make change,” he said.

Force Continuum opens the season with a story about the pressures, tensions, and tragedies that befall cops, black and white alike. The Orphan of Zhao, a classic play from the 13th century, is a story of revenge and the self-sacrifice needed to save the lone survivor of a clan that’s been massacred. The Owl Answers is a surreal exploration of identity that takes place in both the Tower of London and a New York City subway. And White People introduces audiences to three white characters who are all racist in their own individual ways.

White People in particular features characters that are difficult to deal with, said Maguire, and because it’s a three-member cast, the play will be double cast.

“There will be some people I suppose who will feel indicted (by this play), but all of us are somewhat racists to a degree. We’ve been terribly conditioned. It’s systemic,” Maguire said.

“Even if we’ve managed to get to the place where we’re aware of and are doing our best to overcome our individual bias, there’s still bias in the structures that we work in and live in that are difficult to overcome.”

Tough topics are nothing new to Fordham theatre; last season delved into the aftermath of war, and in 2013, the plays touched on homophobia, poverty, and class warfare. But Maguire said there are uplifting elements in this season’s plays, whether it’s the lyrical poetry of The Owl Answers or the revelation of a character in White People.

“No one will come to see our plays if it’s only painful therapy, so we embed that kind of process in work that’s highly entertaining, dramatic, and funny. It’s a very exciting season. These are all great stories,” he said.

“Theatre gives people a homeopathic dose of terror and pity so that when they leave the performance, they’re purged of those things. There are tragic events in each one of these plays, but there’s something that lifts from them, too.”

Maguire said racism is a major challenge facing Americans today. But he cited the hundredth monkey effect as reason for hope. In the story, a monkey living on an island accidentally drops a coconut in the water and decides it likes washed coconuts better. More monkeys follow suit, which causes division and threat on the island between those that wash theirs and those that do not.

But the number of washers rises, until 99 of them are washing their coconuts. One day, the 100th monkey washes his coconut.

“A season like this comes from faith in the hundredth monkey model .You just keep plugging away at it, and then change happens,” he said.” And one day it just is.”

Kai Brothers waxes philosophical when discussing theater. The production manager for the Theatre program talks about the “thingness” of a play and paraphrases French philosopher Georges Bataille, saying that art is essentially wasteful.

“But there has to be waste in order for things to blossom and I think theater is perfect example of that,” said Brothers, gesturing to the large set for Agamemnon, which consumed 30 sheets of plywood and hundreds of feet of lumber.

The production just wrapped up this month in the Pope Auditorium and concluded a series,  A Season of Imagining Post War , that asked the question ‘What if there were no war?”

Brothers’ day-to-day duties involve coordinating artists and designers for almost every physical aspect of a production, from hair and makeup, to costumes, sets, lighting and sound.

Full-time faculty and guest professionals usually direct and design the productions. For Agamemnon, the internationally acclaimed Tea Alagić will direct. But the project was unique in that several students have also taken on leadership roles. Seniors Jessie Bonaventure, Alex deNevers, and Lawrence Schober, designed the sets, lighting, and sound, respectively.

“Typically our student designers work as assistants to professionals, but we have a really strong senior class that were able to take on the challenge and meet it,” said Brothers.

He added that the 16 to 20 design students must compete over the course of the four years for only a couple of design slots that open up each season, creating rather real world competition.

The Agamemnon production was very “build heavy.” Costumes designed by faculty member Becky Bodurtha, were labor-intensive and sculptural. Bonaventure’s sets were series of steps that appear to riff on Mesopotamian ziggurats, deNevers’ lights were incorporated into the structures, and Schober’s sound filled the cocoon-like intimacy of the space.

The production spotlighted Brothers’ more subtle but equally important role, that of mentor and teacher. Yet, the theatre program encourages students to interact with the their professors as professionals.

“It’s a little funky when you’re talking to them,” set designer Bonaventure said of her professors. “Am I talking to a fellow designer, or my production manager, or my mentor? The lines get a little blurred, but in a good way.”

In Brothers, students find a frank professional who has spent more than 12 years as a production manager on and off Broadway in nearly 250 productions.

“There are many different sides to Kai Brothers,” said junior Celina Lam, Agamemnon’s production stage manager. “There are different times where I’m speaking to him at different levels: Sometimes I’m going to him as a learning stage manager in school and ask him how I should run a production meeting. Other times I’m talking to him as a colleague.”

While Brothers teaches only one class, a lab seminar on producing one’s own work, most of his “class time” plays out through building a show. He said that the protocols of the theatre program’s main stage at Pope Auditorium mirror the profession.

“My concerns are less with product and more with process,” he said. “If we can get a designer to talk about what it means to go through a set of drawings, model making, and editing process with scene shop, that’s more important to me than the actual play.”

“We expose our students to the challenges of using their resources effectively—whatever that may be, budgetary, people, time—in order get the artists’ vision up onto the stage,” he said.

He said he loves that he gets to work with so many artists that inhabit a single vision, which, by its very nature, is ephemeral. But at the end of the day, he said, it’s simply story telling.

“You spend all this time, building out a production, you perform it a certain number of times and Whoosh! Poof! It’s gone. Now it’s out there in the cultural zeitgeist and part of the of the culture, that in itself is the thingness of it.”