Sylvan Oswald’s new play SUN RA will receive a reading at La MaMa’s rehearsal studios!
A theatrical response to the life and work of avant-garde jazz composer Sun Ra (who believed he was from Saturn), the play imagines the musician’s last act of self-articulation before dying.
The bandleader is on the wane, returning after a stroke to his childhood home, so his sister can care for him. He abandoned her so long ago, she has no idea who he’s become – of his new name, or of his self-styled mythology that fuses ancient Egypt with outer space. He can speak only through a keyboard, yet his prophetic instinct is still alive in him. He spirals from the outer frame of his homecoming back to his childhood, and through pivotal moments in his middle-age, to conjure for his sister a vision of his deepest identity.
SUN RA explores the story of a radical, black, and probably queer and maybe even autistic artist in the twentieth century. It’s about how an artist nurtures his own exquisite and expansive vision in the face of
disability, racism, and everybody who isn’t ready to hear it yet.
Wednesday, December 19 at 4pm
***This event is sold-out!***
SUN RA
by Sylvan Oswald
directed by Charlotte Brathwaite
music by Samuel Carl Adams
From under her auburn beehive wig, Netta Klein dreams of a life beyond Northeast Philadelphia routine. Down on Columbia Avenue, the stars talk and we listen… Ivy Silver’s your host on community-access radio. It’s August, 1964. And the sparks that fly between two women are about to ignite an entire city. New Georges kicks off its 20th anniversary season with Sylvan Oswald’s brand-new play! Come get lost in the nightlands with us…
Sylvan Oswald creates plays, texts, and publications. His plays are often set in Philadelphia, his hometown. Sylvan’s plays include Sun Ra, Pony, Vendetta Chrome, and Painful Adventures. Recent collaborations include text for puppet-theater artist Dan Hurlin’s Disfarmer at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2009, and Zoetrope, a music-theater work in progress with composer/director Alec Duffy designer Mimi Lien. Sylvan is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a Six Points Fellow for 2010-2012 and the Dorothy B. Strelsin Playwriting Fellow at Soho Rep for 2010-2011. He is the recipient of a Jerome Fellowship from the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, a Thurber House Playwriting Fellowship from The Ohio State University, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Dramatists Guild. Sylvan’s plays have been produced by About Face Theater, Clubbed Thumb, and New Georges. His work has been workshopped or developed with The Foundry Theater, The Hangar Theater, The McCarter Theater, New York Theater Workshop, Portland Center Stage, Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab, and P73’s I73 Writing Group among others. Sylvan created Play A Journal of Plays with Jordan Harrison and currently teaches playwriting at Barnard College and at Purchase College/SUNY.