SLEEPOVA Makes U.S. Premiere at Olney Theatre Center

Olney Theatre Center will produce the U.S. Premiere of Sleepova in the Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab, March 26 - April 27, 2025. The play arrives in the DMV having won the 2024 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate Theatre and the UK Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright for author Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini. Paige Hernandez directs the four-actor ensemble of Tymetrias L. Bolden (Funmi), Ciara Hargrove (Elle), Nykila Norman (Rey), and Jasmine Proctor (Shan). 

Whether or not sleepover parties with friends were part of your upbringing, you’re invited to join Elle, Shan, Funmi, and Rey at theirs. These four Black British teenagers are growing up fast, each coping with their unique challenges of disability, sexuality, religion, and family. But even these issues – whether living with sickle cell disease, coming out, a crisis of faith, or a romantic misadventure, are confronted with humor, sincerity, and optimism. The Guardian said the show has, “All the clumsiness and wide-eyed excitability of the best coming-of-age dramas… an exhilarating tableau of imperfect young friendship and you leave wanting an invite to their next party.”

Playwright Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini says, "It has been a long dream of mine for my work to reach places and audiences I can't get to. So to have Sleepova's US premiere at the Olney Theatre Center is a dream come true. Sleepova is an invitation to audiences into the lives of these 4 young Black British girls and how differently we all come of age. I hope audiences come ready to laugh, dance and be reminded the power of friendships."

Jason Loewith, Olney Theatre’s Artistic Director says “Ever since I saw Sleepova in London at the amazing Bush Theatre, I’ve wanted to share it with our audiences. Matilda is a singular playwright, and with this play, she celebrates a community at once utterly familiar and strikingly different from what we know here in the United States.  We’re so proud to give Matilda’s play its American premiere.”

Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini is a multi-award-winning, bionic playwright, author and filmmaker of Nigerian heritage from London. Matilda was selected as a Star of Tomorrow 2020 by Screen Daily Magazine; a feature film screenplay they co-wrote with Gabriel-Bisset Smith was selected as part of The Brit List 2020; they were an Arts Foundation Futures Award 2021 Finalist; a BFI Flare x BAFTA 2023 mentee; and Inevitable Foundation x Loreen Arbus Elevate Collective Award Grantee 2024. As a playwright, Matilda’s debut play Muscovado premiered in October 2014 and subsequently won the Alfred Fagon Audience Award 2015. They have written audio dramas for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and Audible. Matilda’s next play Little Miss Burden premiered at the Bunker Theatre in 2019 and won a Popcorn Finalist Award 2020. Sleepova is her most recent work and the first to be performed outside the United Kingdom.

She explains that, “I adopted the term ‘bionic’ when I became a full-time wheelchair user and had metal implanted into my leg after a traumatic fracture, even though the term encompasses my experiences from birth, that I have always needed some form of technology, equipment, or adaptation to live.” One of Sleepova’s main characters Shan, is living with sickle cell disease, Ibini explains, “I wrote Shan and her experience in a way that I would have loved to see this type of character growing up. Living with a chronic condition isn’t the be-all and end-all of my life. And that there are other ways to live, and just because my life doesn’t look like that of my peers or siblings even, doesn’t make my life tragic or any less valid. It’s simply different.”

The artistic team, in addition to Hernandez, includes Scenic Designer Shartoya R. Jn. Baptiste,  Lighting Designer John D. Alexander, Costume Designer Danielle Preston, Sound Designer Cresent R. Haynes, Projections Designer Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor, Intimacy and Fight Choreographer Sierra Young, Dialect Coach Gerrad Alex Taylor, Assistant Director Dannielle Hutchinson, Assistant Lighting Designer Niya John, Stage Manager Kelsey N. Jenkins, and Assistant Stage Manager Ebony Gennes. Understudy swings for the production are Leilani Clendenin (Funmi/Rey) and Courtney Simmons (Elle/Shan).

To help audiences get in the Sleepova spirit, anyone attending a performance in pajamas can receive 25% off their first drink!

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