Curio Theatre Company Welcomes Shirley Chisholm For One Night Only

Curio Theatre Company will be visited by an American Icon this February. For one night only, the company is presenting Shirley Chisholm: Unbossed & Unbowed, A ONE-WOMAN SHOW by Ingrid Griffith,  that gives audiences a unique and intimate look at the public and private life of an African American woman determined to make the Land of Opportunity deliver on its promises.

This show will be performed at Curio on Saturday, February 8th at 7 p.m. in Calvary’s  chapel. Entrance is  4740 Baltimore Ave. Tickets are Pay What You Can with a suggested donation of $30. Audiences who can afford it are encouraged to pay a little extra for an audience member who can’t afford to pay and to cover credit card fees... Find tickets and more information at www.curiotheatre.org. This performance is designed for audiences ages 10 and up. 

Ingrid Griffith, the creator and performer of “Unbossed and Unbowed”, portrays the trailblazer Shirley Chisholm and inhabits 15 other characters in this 75-minute solo performance with no intermission The stage play dramatizes how Shirley’s race and gender were supposed to determine how far Shirley would go in life and how her Caribbean parents’ immigrant determination and personal willpower pushed her to overcome that fate and rise.  

Unbossed & Unbowed intertwines the public and private life of Shirley Chisholm, beginning when she was a child living in Bed Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.  Her immigrant parents arrived from the Caribbean to the U.S. in the early 1920s.  By the end of the decade, came The Great Depression and in order to make ends meet, they decided to send 3-year old Shirley and her younger siblings to live with their maternal grandmother in Barbados.  The evocation of the world Shirley entered when she returned to the U.S. from Barbados at age 10, will show how race and gender determined how far Shirley would go in life; why she chose to fight for the disenfranchised; what it took for her to win a seat in Congress in 1968 and what pushed her to run for the highest office in the land in 1972.

“I’m excited to bring Shirley Chisholm: Unbossed & Unbowed to Curio,” said Griffith. “Philadelphia is the birthplace of democracy and the cradle of diversity, all that trailblazing Shirley Chisholm stands for.” 

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