CENTERSTAGE announces casting for the final Play Lab reading of the season, Jerome Hairston's Knife on Bone. The reading, which closes the 2010-11 Season, is May 26-29 and will be directed by Dwight R.B. Cook.
Making their CENTERSTAGE debuts with the reading will be Chad L. Coleman, recognizable to audiences as Dennis "Cutty" Wise on The Wire, and Broadway veteran Francois Battiste (Prelude to a Kiss). Familiar to CENTERSTAGE audiences are Pascale Armand (Let There Be Love, 2009-10) and Toccarra Cash (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, 2009-10).
Knife on Bone: Against the backdrop of a meatpacking plant on the other side of the tracks, necessity and a series of snap decisions bring one young couple to the brink of an almost impossible choice-weighing the competing demands of justice and family. Jerome Hairston's new play, a CENTERSTAGE commission, grabs hard at the double-edged blade of responsibility. Hairston's previous work here includes his play a.m. Sunday in 2003-04, a workshop of an earlier draft of Knife on Bone for the 2006-07 First Look series, and a staged adaptation of the Supreme Court arguments in Brown v. Board of Education.
Tickets to the Play Lab are $10 and can be purchased online at www.centerstage.org/playlab, or by calling 410.332.0033. Once again we are sharing the development process with the audience with an open rehearsal on Saturday, May 28, beginning at 3 pm. There is no cost to sit in on the rehearsal, but reservations are required. Please send your name and number of guests to reservations@centerstage.org if you plan on attending the rehearsal.
Jerome Hairston is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA playwriting program. His plays include a.m. Sunday, L'Eboueur Sleeps Tonight, Forty Minute Finish, and Method Skin. His work has been developed and presented at theaters such as
Playwrights Horizons, The
Atlantic Theater Company,
Hartford Stage Company, and New York Stage and Film, as well as the Shenandoah Playwrights Retreat, the Sundance Theater Lab, and the
Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference. While still in his teens, Hairston's work was featured twice in the Young Playwrights Festival in New York, and he was also the recipient of the 1998 Kennedy Center/American College Theater Festival's National Student Playwriting Award.
Dwight R.B. Cook, Director, holds the position of production manager for Morgan State University's Carl J. Murphy Fine Arts Center. In New York he directed productions for The
New Federal Theatre, National Black Theatre, The Roger Furman Theatre, The World Famous
Apollo Theatre, Golden Squirrel Theatre, Blue River Productions, Stonewall Repertory Company, and
Crossroads Theatre Company (NJ), among others. In Baltimore he has most recently directed Crumbs by Al Letson at the Theatre Project; Run Of The Mill Theatre's productions of Variations on Fear, Variations on Justice, and Variations on Power; CENTERSTAGE's First Look Series; for Blue River Productions; and for the Theatre of the Rising Sun. He has worked in both television and on Broadway as a stage manager, and appeared on Broadway, at MET, and at a number of Off/Off-Off Broadway and Regional stages. Dwight is the author of The Funeral (A Gnu Musical Comedy); Skeets & Toh; Night Songs; Me, Bessie...A Chattanooga Gal!; and It's Time, co-written with Grenoldo G. Frazier. He has also adapted
Edgar Allen Poe's The Imp of the Perverse, The Tell Tale Heart, and The Black Cat for the stage.
Since 1963, CENTERSTAGE has been committed to producing and developing an eclectic repertory of challenging, bold, and thought-provoking work, representing a varied array of theatrical styles and forms, in collaboration with leading artists. Each year, a consistently broad range of productions in two intimate performing spaces attracts highly diverse audiences of more than 100,000 people-including thousands of fiercely loyal subscriber members, many of whom have been with the theater during its entire history. Additionally, CENTERSTAGE offers a variety of dramaturgical, community, and educational programs to broaden access and enhance the theatergoing experience, earning its honorary designation as the official State Theater of Maryland.
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