Everything That Rises Must Converge at Fall 2024 Tour

From Compagnia de’ Colombari, the company and director whose SOLD-OUT run of KING LEAR at La MaMa surprised and delighted audiences in July, comes Everything That Rises Must Converge (ETRMC), a short story by Southern American author Flannery O’Connor. Compagnia de' Colombari will perform Everything That Rises Must Converge at St. Paul's Church in Brooklyn (234 Congress Street) on Sunday, October 13 (doors open at 5:30pm, performance begins at 6pm, party at 7pm). The performance will mark the end of the company's U.S. and international tour of Everything That Rises Must Converge (September 18 to October 10, 2024) and conclude Compagnia de' Colombari's triumphant 20th Anniversary Season. Please join us after the performance for a joyful celebration with refreshments. The afterparty is included in the ticket price!

Everything That Rises Must Converge is a tragi-comic seat-shifting dance between Blacks and whites on a bus in America's deep South, performed verbatim as written in O’Connor’s original 1961 text. Fear of the stranger, competing self-righteousness, and pretense are central to the American experience. Seven diverse actors explore these elements and hilariously perform them without a speck of sentimentality in Everything That Rises Must Converge.

The story draws upon the platitudes perpetuated by an older culture and the misery of disenfranchised youth. The collision of generations and races on a bus ride mines an existential truth: "If you know who you are, you can go anywhere."

Written in the early 1960s, the parallels with today are clear. We are in a post-Rosa Parks era, but are we really? O’Connor’s text (like Shakespeare’s) draws upon the overturning of many well-known proverbial sayings (“Rome wasn’t built in a day”). The story examines and overturns hideous cultural assumptions. The theater piece puts these assumptions in a relief that exposes–through comedy–the necessity for a new consciousness. In ETRMC, love takes no prisoners; everyone must converge together.

This year marks Compagnia de’ Colombari’s 20th anniversary season, and the return of Everything That Rises Must Converge to Rome for four performances with workshops and talkbacks fifteen years after its premiere at the International Flannery O’Connor conference in Rome, organized by the Poetics and Christianity Project in 2009. The show has toured the USA and internationally since and is embarking on a tour across America through October following the performances in Rome.

ETRMC will be witnessed for the first time in Texas, Ohio and North Carolina, with performances at two New York State detention centers and a return to New York City, Colombari’s home base. The theatrical adaptation of Everything That Rises Must Converge was first developed (with two other stories, A View of the Woods and Greenleaf) at the University of Iowa in 1998, at Sundance Theatre Lab in 1999, and Off-Broadway to sold-out audiences at New York Theatre Workshop in 2001.

Karin Coonrod is the sole adaptor of O’Connor’s works for theatre, given permission directly from the estate. She felt called to bring O'Connor’s–a compelling, courageous, and controversial writer–worlds and words to the stage after encountering her stories at age 19 in an American literature class. To Coonrod, O'Connor is the American Dante, from the red clay of Georgia to the realm beyond.

Throughout 2024, Compagnia de’ Colombari is celebrating 20 years of generating spectacle, disrupting and reconstructing texts and spaces under the direction of Karin Coonrod with a robust Anniversary Season. Of Coonrod’s direction, The New York Times proclaimed, “this experimental director has a knack for transforming high concepts into accessible theater” and calls her “a theater artist of far-reaching inventiveness” who uses a “style that deconstructs to construct.” Other season highlights include the world premiere of KING LEAR at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in June, the sold-out NYC debut at La MaMa ETC in July, and multiple U.S. tour dates for Whitman on Walls! (WoW!).

Authors

• Flannery O'Connor