Juneteenth Legacy Theatre will present the NY Premiere of Lorna Littleway's new drama Motion and Location at the Midtown InterNational Theatre Festival on July 25th -August 6th at the Mainstage Theatre (312 West 36th Street, 4th Floor). Sue Lawless directs.
The show, which was a finalist in the TRU Voices Play Reading Series, "features a 17 year-old African American who hopes to parlay her college athletic scholarship into a career as a professional baseball player. Caught between her free-spirited Aunt and her disciplined Mother, 'Clarissa' fights to make her own dreams come true," state press notes.
Motion and Location will feature
Geany Masai (2000 OOBR Award for the
Vital Theatre Company's
Shakin' The Mess Outta Misery as "Miss Lamama, member of the cast in the Audelco Award winning Best Play in 1997's In A Clean House) as 'Mrs. Mills, Susan Froix ('One Life to Live," Warner Brother's "Third Watch") as 'Aunt Bo,' and Tamara Green as 'Clarissa'.
Littleway's plays include
The Lives of Young Black Folk: Bang! Bang!
Bang! and
Young Sistas (2005 NY Fringe Festival);
Motion and Location
(at Luna Sea/San Francisco, TRU and
Ensemble Studio Theatre/NYC);
Black
Absurdity (La Mama, etc);
If You Love Me (Chocolate Church/Bath,
Maine: "Best Play" Award, and Little Theatre/Dallas);
Billy, Lena and
The Duke: A Night of Ellington Music! and
Kindler Genter Nation
(Kentucky Center for the Arts and Iowa State University/Ames). She has
also written several plays about 18th Century African-American poet,
Phillis Wheatley, and is working on a book for the musical
WAR: Women of the American Revolution.
Founded in 1999, Juneteenth Legacy Theatre derives its name from the
traditional African-American holiday, "juneteenth" which commemorates
the date, June 19, 1865, when slaves in the western territories learned
of their freedom two-and-one-half years after the Emancipation
Proclamation. Juneteenth Legacy Theatre, a development company of
original and new works about the African-American experience and its
legacy, presented an evening two one-acts
, The Lives of Young Black Folk, at the
2005 NYC Fringe Festival. Based in NYC and Louisville, (where it is the only
professional African American theatre company), Juneteenth has produced
72 new works (including its annual 3-week festival hosted by Actors
Theatre of Louisville.)
Running July 17th - August 6th, the Midtown Inter
National Theatre Festival features some 40 shows in four venues, all on the same block. Additional information on the Festival can be found at
www.midtownfestival.org.
All seats for
Motion and Location are $18 and are available through Smarttix at (212) 529-7857 or (212) 529-8190. For more information about Juneteenth Legacy Theatre go to,
www.juneteenthlegacytheatre.com.
