Williams Street Rep to Open CONTEMPORARY VOICES Reading Series, 10/7

On October 7, 2013 at 7:00pm Williams Street Repertory launches a new initiative entitled Contemporary Voices. This playwright reading series will feature the esteemed works of Lee Blessing, J.T.Rogers, Daniel Stern and more.

Sandy Shinner, former associate director of Victory Gardens has signed on to direct a staged reading of J.T. Rogers's "White People." Talent for the evening will include James Knight (I Am The Machine Gunner, Hartford Stage Company and recent filmwork in Now You See Me), Alicia Regan (Sex and the City, Sopranos, Epic Rep) and Mark Mahallak (The Rocky Horror Show, Company).

J.T. Rogers is the recent recipient of the Pinter Review Prize for Drama, the American Theatre Critics Association's Osborne Award, and the William Inge Center for the Arts' New Voices Award. His highly acclaimed play, White People, is a controversial and darkly funny play about the lives of three ordinary Americans placed under the spot-light: Martin, a Brooklyn-born high powered attorney for a white-shoe law firm in St. Louis, MO; Mara Lynn, a housewife and former home-coming queen in Fayetteville, NC; and Alan, a young professor struggling to find his way in New York City. Through heart-wrenching confessions, they wrestle with guilt, prejudice, and the price they and their children must pay for their actions. White People is a candid, brutally honest meditation on race and language in our culture.

The Chicago Daily Herald hails White People as being "provocative, immediate and brilliant" while TimeOut New York raves about the playwright saying, "Rogers is the rarest of creatures: an American playwright with a social conscience and the desire to make damning connections between human psychology and ideology."