Huntington Theatre Co Announces Special Events In Conjunction With TOPDOG/UNDERDOG

In conjunction with its upcoming production of Topdog/Underdog the Huntington Theatre Company will host a number of special events and post-show conversations. Admission to onsite post-show events is free with a ticket to Topdog/Underdog, available at huntingtontheatre.org/topdog by phone at 617 266 0800, or in person at the BU Theatre (264 Huntington Avenue) and Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA (527 Tremont Street) box offices. Tickets start at $25. Performances begin Friday, March 10, 2017 at the Avenue of the Arts/BU Theatre.

POST-SHOW AUDIENCE CONVERSATIONS
After the first Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evening performances and most Wednesday, Saturday, and Sundaymatinee performances.
An opportunity for audience members to discuss what they have just seen. Led by members of the Huntington staff.

COOLIDGE CORNER SCREENING OF MENACE II SOCIETY

Monday, March 13 at 7pm

Tickets: http://www.coolidge.org/films/menace-ii-society (Huntington subscribers receive discount with code)

Menace II Society follows the life of Caine Lawson as he tries to leave behind his life in the Los Angeles projects. A groundbreaking and defining film of the early '90s, Menace II Society stars Jada Pinkett Smith and Samuel L. Jackson and Allen and Albert Hughes in their directorial debut. Entertainment Weekly says, "Menace II Society is brilliant." Join us after the film for a conversation withLisa Simmons, president of The Color of Film Collaborative, and WGBH's Phillip Martin about the shared themes in Menace II Society and Topdog/Underdog.

Lisa Simmons has been involved in the production, support, exhibition, and distribution of film and theatre in and around the Boston area for over 25 years. In addition, Ms. Simmons is the founder and president of The Color of Film Collaborative, Inc. (TCOF), an organization of actors, producers, directors, and others with an interest in creating and supporting positive images of people of color in film, theatre, and other media. The Color of Film Collaborative produces the Roxbury International Film Festival, a film festival that celebrates diverse images of people of color in the world. In addition, TCOF produces a Dinner and a Movie (DAAM) series four times a year. Ms. Simmons is currently working on a documentary about the Negro Theater Project during the Works Progress Administration.

Phillip Martin joined WGBH in the spring of 2010, and has since reported on human trafficking in southern New England, the Boston Marathon bombing, Whitey Bulger, carbon offset schemes, police shootings, training and race, the Occupy movement, and the fishing industry in New England, among other topics. He is a regular panelist for "Basic Black" and an occasional panelist for "Beat the Press," and hosted the World Compass 2012 presidential primary coverage. He is a senior fellow with the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and a 2012 International Center for Journalists Ford Foundation Fellow. MR. Martin has worked as a supervising senior editor for NPR and was NPR's first national race-relations correspondent, from 1998 to 2001. In 1995, in his role as a senior producer, he helped create "The World." He earned a master's degree in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and studied international protection of human rights law at Harvard Law School as well as journalism at the University of California at Berkeley in the Program for Minority Journalists.

HUNTINGTON COMMUNITY MEMBERSHIP INITIATIVE RECEPTION
Thursday, March 16 at 6pm
A pre-show reception with refreshments for members of the Huntington Community Membership Initiative. Community Membership is an initiative designed to reduce the cost barrier of attending live theatre for those with limited income and to diversify the audiences so they better reflect the city of Boston. Members can purchase best-available tickets to any performance without restriction for just $20. Membership is free and available through partnerships with agencies and organizations that serve limited-income populations.

Bank of America is the Season Sponsor of the Huntington Community Membership Initiative. Made possible by a grant from Theatre Communications Group.

ACTORS FORUMS
Friday, March 17 after the 10am performance (student matinee)
Thursday, March 23 after the 7:30pm performance
Thursday, March 30 after the 10am performance (student matinee)
Wednesday, April 5 after the 2pm performance
Meet participating members of the cast of Topdog/Underdog and ask them your questions at the Actors Forum, following the performance.

STUDENT MATINEE
Friday, March 17 at 10am
Thursday, March 30 at 10am
Recommended for students in grades 9-12. Tickets: $15. Includes pre-show in-school visit, curriculum guide, post-show Actors Forum, and Dramatic Returns card for each student. Call Manager of Education Operations Meg O'Brien atmobrien@huntingtontheatre.org or 617 273 1558 for more information.

HUMANITIES FORUM & BOSTON GLOBE EVENT WITH COLUMNIST YVONNE ABRAHAM

Sunday, March 19, after the 2pm performance

Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham and Deputy Director for the Mayor's Office of Public Safety Initiatives Conan Harriswill lead a post-show discussion about the themes in Topdog/Underdog after the 2pm performance on March 19. A Boston Globeevent - tickets to the March 19 performance are $45 for Boston Globe subscribers who use the discount code.

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Yvonne Abraham is a columnist for the Metro section of The Boston Globe. Ms. Abraham's work appears on Thursdays and Sundays. She previously covered state and national politics, and immigration at the Globe. She came to the paper in 1998 from the Boston Phoenix.

Conan Harris is currently the Deputy Director for the Mayor's Office of Public Safety Initiatives. The Office of Public Safety Initiatives was created by the Walsh administration with the mission and commitment to develop sustainable systems through a lens of access, opportunity and innovation as it relates to violence prevention and intervention. Mr. Harris is also the Director of My Brother's Keeper Boston, a White House Initiative to improve the outcomes for black and brown boys and men. Prior to the Mayor's Office, Mr. Harris was the StreetWorker Manager for StreetSafe Boston, an initiative of The Boston Foundation. StreetSafe works with Boston's young people by deploying Street Workers to engage proven risk youth. Building on strong and trusting mentoring relationships, Street Workers intervene in and prevent violence, connecting young people to much needed programs and services. Mr. Harris holds a BA in sociology from Boston University. He has consulted nationally and internationally on various violence prevention/intervention, and youth development programming. Mr. Harris speaks publicly to universities and leading nonprofits on CORI laws, reentry issues, and the Prison Industrial Complex. It is Mr. Harris' personal experience in overcoming many of the challenges that are prevalent in the inner-city that drives his dedication and determination to make a positive difference in urban communities. Being raised by a single mother and a family of strong women helped shape his values. He holds them all near and dear, especially his wife Ayanna and pride and joy, daughter Cora.

A CONVERSATION WITH CHIEF RESILIENCE OFFICER FOR THE CITY OF BOSTON DR. ATYIA MARTIN
Part of the Racial Equity Learning Series by the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture

Saturday, March 25 after the 2pm performance
Join Chief Resilience Officer Dr. Atyia Martin and Huntington dramaturg Charles Haugland for a post-show discussion after the 2pm performance of Topdog/Underdog on March 25, part of the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture's Racial Equity Learning Series, a continuation of the Mayor's racial equity discussions throughout Boston, using the arts as a catalyst for conversation about race and class.

Dr. Atyia Martin is a certified emergency manager with a diverse set of experiences in public health, emergency management, intelligence, and homeland security. Mayor Martin J. Walsh appointed her as the Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Boston as part of the 100 Resilient Cities initiative pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation. In this role, she is responsible for leading the development and implementation of Boston's Resilience Strategy. Boston will focus on advancing racial equity as the foundation of the Resilience Strategy process to increase our shared ability to thrive after emergencies. DR. Martin was previously the director of the office of public health preparedness at the Boston Public Health Commission. Her previous professional experience includes the Boston Police Department's Boston Regional Intelligence Center; City of Boston's Mayor's Office of Emergency Management; the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI); and active duty Air Force assigned to the National Security Agency. DR. Martin has also been adjunct faculty in the Master of Homeland Security at Northeastern University. DR. Martin and her husband were born and raised in Boston where they currently live. They have five children.

BOSTON LAW NIGHT
Thursday, March 30 at 7:30pm
A post-show wine and dessert reception for law professionals and participating members of the cast of Topdog/Underdog.

Boston Law Night is a private event, by invitation only.

AUDIO-DESCRIBED PERFORMANCES
Thursday, March 30 at 10am (student matinee)
Saturday, April 1 at 2pm
The Huntington Theatre Company offers audio description for blind and low-vision patrons at designated performances.

Tickets are $20 for each patron and an additional $20 ticket can be purchased for a guest. To reserve tickets, please contact Access Coordinator Meg O'Brien at mobrien@huntingtontheatre.org or 617 273 1558.

35 BELOW WRAP PARTY
Friday, March 31, following the 8pm performance
A post-show party for young patrons aged 35 and below, featuring backstage access, free refreshments, and entertainment. Join us for a carnival-themed 35 Below After Party complete with a caricature artist, cornhole, ring toss, card games, and cotton candy.Mingle with members of the cast, creative team, and Huntington staff. Plus, meet other young theatre lovers in Boston!

35 Below tickets are available at all performances to patrons 35 and under for just $30.

A CONVERSATION WITH HARVARD PROFESSOR GLENDA R. CARPIO

Sunday, April 2 after the 2pm performance
Join Harvard professor Glenda Carpio and Huntington dramaturg Charles Haugland for a post-show discussion after the 2pmperformance of Topdog/Underdog on April 2.

Glenda R. Carpio is Professor of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University. Her book,Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. She is currently working on a book on immigration, expatriation, and exile in American literature. Professor Carpio recently co-edited African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011) with Professor Werner Sollors. Professor Carpio started her teaching career in Compton, California where she taught 8th grade English and 4th grade through the Teach for America program. She recently received Harvard University's Abramson Award for Excellence and Sensitivity in Undergraduate Teaching. She received her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA was earned at Vassar College. She was awarded tenure at Harvard University in 2009. Professor Carpio was named one of the ROOT.com 100 for 2010.

ROXBURY COMMUNITY COLLEGE NIGHT
Tuesday, April 4, following the 7:30pm performance
Roxbury Community College students, faculty, and alumni are invited to attend the Roxbury Community College Night performance of Topdog/Underdog. After the show, join Reverend Liz Walker, Kim McLarin, Daniel Callahan, Ashleigh Gordon, and Robbie McCauley for a special post-show discussion moderated by Roxbury Community College's Director of Fine, Performing, and Media ArtS Marshall Hughes.

Reverend Liz Walker is pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church. She was called to this ministry after 21 years as Boston's first African American television news anchor on WBZ and 12 years of humanitarian work in war torn Sudan where she co-founded My Sisters' Keeper, a grassroots initiative that built a school for girls, the first of its kind in that country's southern region. Under Reverend Walker's leadership, Roxbury Presbyterian Church is home to the Cory Johnson Program for Post-Traumatic Healing, an innovative effort that addresses the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder in a low income African American community too often overrun by violence. In addition to building the girls' school in Akon, South Sudan, Reverend Walker helped initiate an inter-tribal women's program called Sisterhood for Peace, a network of Sudanese women that collaborated for peace across race, ethnicity, religion and geography. Reverend Walker is an advisor to the Women2Women International Leadership Program which is creating a network of promising young activists from around the world, and she has done extensive work with the State Department in Brussels, Belgium helping young Muslims, Christians and Jews develop intercultural communications skills. Before Boston, her career in television news took her from Arkansas to Colorado then on to San Francisco where she received television's highest honor, the Emmy Award for her coverage of the Jonestown massacre, one of the most horrific tragedies in American history. A 2005 graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Reverend Walker is a member of the Core Strategy Team of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization and serves on the Board for the New England Chapter of the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund.

Kim McLarin is the author of three critically-acclaimed novels and the memoir Divorce Dog: Men, Motherhood and Midlife, as well as co-author of Growing Up X by Ilyasah Shabazz with Kim McLarin. Her short fiction has appeared inCalaloo, The Double Dealer, Solstice and Confrontation, and other publications. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, The Washington Post, Slate, The Morning News, and other newspapers and magazines. She is a former reporter for The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Associated Press. Ms. McLarin is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston and a regular commentator on "Basic Black" on WGBH.

Daniel Callahan is a writer, director and multimedia artist and designer living in Roxbury. He refers to his work as "transmedia" in that it merges various disciplines including but not limited to sound, video, painting, collage, photography, and performance to create immersive experiences that seek to transcend medium and bridge the gap between the mundane and metaphysical. He is most known for his painterly technique of MassQing; the ritual application of paint to the face used to reveal rather than conceal one's inner essence. In using the human face as a canvas Mr. Callahan's work requires an intimate encounter between artist, subject, and viewer and derives from the ancient phenomenon of body decoration practiced by nearly all indigenous cultures on the planet.

He is also currently working on his directorial debut; a feature length psychological drama film entitled Come On In which he wrote, and is co-starring and co-producing. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he received the Fine Arts Chair Award for outstanding work in a senior thesis exhibit. He is currently a Graduate MFA Fellow in the Visual Media Arts Program at Emerson College. His work has been featured in the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art and has been featured in such publications asBeliever Magazine, The Bay State Banner, and Words Beats & Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture. He is co-founder of the artist collective Fear & Fancy; a recipient of the Donor Circle for the Arts Grant, out of Oakland, California. yearofthemassq.com. comeoninfilm.com.

Ashleigh Gordon has performed throughout North America, Europe, and Hong Kong, ranging from chamber and orchestral music settings to Off Broadway and new music productions. Passionate about contemporary music, Ms. Gordon performs regularly with the Callithumpian Consort, ECCE Ensemble and Sound Energy (of which she is the founder), and has performed and recorded with Switzerland's Ensemble Proton, Germany's Ensemble Modern, and Boston's BMOP. As an advocate of social change through education, she is a viola instructor in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra's Intensive Community Program (ICP), a rigorous string instrumental program which provides instruction to populations often underrepresented in classical music. As an entrepreneur, she is artistic director and violist of Castle of our Skins (COOS), a concert and educational series devoted to celebrating black artistry through music. With COOS, she brings thought-provoking concert experiences blending music, spoken word, history and culture to classrooms and concert halls in Boston and beyond. In recognition for her work, she has presented at IDEAS UMass Boston and 180 Degrees Festival in Bulgaria; has been featured in print, on air and television in the International Musician Magazine, All Ears podcast and Boston's Neighborhood Networks; and was recently awarded the 2016 Charles Walton Diversity Advocate Award from the American Federation of Musicians. She is a 2015 St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award recipient and can be heard on chamber music and orchestral recordings under the Mode, Siemens, BMOP/Sound, Navona and Musiques-Suisse record labels.

Robbie McCauley is a Theatre Arts USA Ford Fellow (2012) and has been an active presence in the American avant-garde theatre for several decades. She is the recipient of a Bessie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance, received an Obie Award for her play Sally's Rape, and recently received the IRNE Award (Independent Reviewers of New England) for the writing and performance of her play SUGAR as well as a 2015 nomination for Jazz 'n Class. She is widely anthologized including Extreme Exposure; Moon Marked and Touched by Sun; and Performance and Cultural Politicsedited respectively by Jo Bonney, Sydne Mahone, and Elin Diamond; and recently in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic and Solo Black Woman edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Joni L. Jones respectively. One of the early cast members of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, Ms. McCauley went on to write, direct and perform regularly in cities across the country and abroad striving to facilitate dialogues on race between locAl Whites and blacks, and other ethnic groups, in various regions. She created the Primary Sources series, produced by The Arts Company in Mississippi, Boston, and Los Angeles. In 1998, her "Buffalo Project" was highlighted as one of "The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments" by the Village Voice; a roster that included work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage. She continues to direct, act, and write for theatre in the Boston theatre community where she is co-founder and artistic director of Roxbury Repertory Theatre. She was the 2013-2014 Monan Professor at Boston College and is professor emerita of Emerson College Department of Performing Arts.

A CONVERSATION WITH MIT PROFESSOR SANDY ALEXANDRE

Saturday, April 8 after the 2pm performance
Join MIT professor Sandy Alexandre and Huntington dramaturg Charles Haugland for a post-show discussion after the 2pmperformance of Topdog/Underdog on April 8.

Sandy Alexandre's research spans the late 19th-century to present-day black American literature and culture. Her first book, The Properties of Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations of Lynching (Mississippi 2012), uses the history of American lynching violence as a framework to understand matters concerning displacement, property ownership, and the American pastoral ideology in a literary context. For example, in one chapter - on Toni Morrison'sBeloved (1987) - she asks readers to consider the gendered implications of seeing lynching iconography itself as a form of owned property. Ms. Alexandre is currently writing another book, Up From Chattels: Thinghood in an Ethics of Black Curation, which will take as its point of departure the premise that the former, enforced condition of black Americans as fungible merchandise can haunt, inform, and morally energize, to some extent, their very own relationships to material objects. This book will explore how some black Americans create what Ms. Alexandre calls a "culture of significance" with material objects. Using literary analysis, studying material artifacts, and engaging the work of black collectors, Ms. Alexandre argues that this improvised, curated, and eventually sacralized culture of subject-object relations constitutes an immanent critique of consumer capitalism. Overall, Ms. Alexandre's work takes into serious account the ways in which an ecology comprised of people, places, and things can, at once, reverberate and attempt to negotiate the various instances of racial violence that mark the aggregate of US history.

PRODUCTION INFORMATION AND CALENDAR

WHEN

March 10 - April 9, 2017

Select Evenings: Tues. - Thurs. at 7:30pm; Fri. - Sat. at 8pm; select Sun. at 7pm

Matinees: Select Wed., Sat., and Sun. at 2pm

Days and times vary; see complete schedule below.

Press Opening: Wednesday, March 15, 7pm. RSVP online.

WHERE

Avenue of the Arts/BU Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston

TICKETS

Single tickets starting at $25 and FlexPasses are on sale:

online at huntingtontheatre.org;

by phone at 617 266 0800; or

in person at the BU Theatre Box Office, 264 Huntington Ave. and the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA Box Office, 527 Tremont St. in Boston's South End.

Select discounts apply:

$5 off: seniors

$10 off: subscribers and BU community (faculty/staff/alumni)

$30 "35 Below" tickets for patrons 35 years old and younger (valid ID required)

$20 student and military tickets (valid ID required)

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