Blacktop Sky by Christina Anderson
Directed by Dominic Taylor                          Saturday, July 10th, 7:30pm

Klass, a homeless, young Black man, sets up residence in the courtyard of a housing project where Ida Peters lives. Triggered by a fatal confrontation between a local street vendor and the police, they quickly develop a precarious bond against the backdrop of a restless neighborhood. Inspired by the Greek myth "Leda and the Swan," Blacktop Sky questions the concept of love, violence, and seduction in a new theatrical style.

In 1872, two Washington, D.C. police officers stumble upon a man that they believe has nowhere to go. This man was Osborne P. Anderson, the sole survivor of Harper's Ferry raid, a Civil War veteran, and one America's unsung heroes. He was one of five free black men who helped John Brown attack the arsenal in an attempt to arm slaves and abolitionists in1859. A drama with music, this play follows Osborne's journey to fight for America.

For the art patron who has everything, ballet companies are offering something novel: the dancers themselves. In this provocative play the patron is white and the principal ballerina is black. Dance, Salome, Dance questions this perplexing entanglement of patronage, commodification, race, and desire.

Christina Anderson was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. Plays include: Inked Baby, Blacktop Sky, Good Goods, Man in Love, The Cause of the Effect, Sweet Brown Ginger, and Drip. Her work has appeared at A.C.T., About Face Theatre, Crowded Fire, Ars Nova, Mark Taper Forum, The Coterie Theatre, Playwrights Horizons and other theaters all over the country. Awards and honors include Schwarzman Legacy Scholarship awarded by Paula Vogel, Susan Smith Blackburn nomination, Lorraine Hansberry Award (American College Theater Festival), Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship (New Dramatists), Wasserstein Prize nomination (Dramatists Guild), Lucy Lortel Fellowship (Brown University). American Theatre Magazine selected Anderson as one of fifteen up-and-coming artists "whose work will be transforming America's stages for decades to come." She is currently an M.F.A. candidate at Yale School of Drama's Playwriting Program.

Tanya Fernando received both her B.A. in History and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. She also holds an M.A. from NYU in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Performance Studies. Her teaching and research interests bring together a wide variety of disciplines, including history, anthropology, and the literary, visual, and performing arts. The classes she designs are based on themes or concepts, such as primitivism, modernism, or beauty, and seek to elaborate larger theoretical and political issues by using texts from across the humanities and social sciences. She is currently working on a book, Shock Treatments, that traces a genealogy of ‘shock,' one of modernism's significant modes of representation, critique, and cure. She demonstrates how, in the early decades of the twentieth century, modernist shock worked as an organizing aesthetic principle that established a discursive link between theories of race and sexuality, and a range of disciplines, particularly medicine, psychology, and anthropology.

Dominic Taylor is the Associate Artistic Director of Penumbra Theatre. Mr. Taylor has directed a variety of theatre projects including the opera Fresh Faust at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, The Negroes Burial Ground at the Kitchen, N.Y.C., Destiny and Uppa Creek at Dixon Place, and Ride The Rhythm in the Hip-Hop Theatre Festival. At the University of Minnesota he has directed The Wiz, Night Train to Bolina, and Execution of Justice. At Penumbra, he directed Black Nativity: A Season for Change in 2009, and he will re-imagine and direct Black Nativity: Now is the Time for 2010. Mr. Taylor's written work includes Wedding Dance and Personal History, both produced at the Kennedy Center by the African Continuum Theatre. Wedding Dance was also produced at The Crossroads Theatre Company and was awarded an AT&T On Stage Grant. His play I Wish You Love will premiere at Penumbra Theatre in the April of 2011 before a move to the Kennedy Center as part of its New Play Initiative. He has also worked with Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, The Public Theatre, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, New York Theatre Workshop, Rites and Reasons Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Ensemble Studio Theatre among others. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a professor at the University of Minnesota.