Theatre for a New Audience Postpones Previews for WEDDING BAND

TFANA (Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director) has cancelled the first four performances of its new production of Alice Childress's Wedding Band, directed by Awoye Timpo, due to two COVID-19 cases discovered through TFANA's routine testing of the company: April 23 at 7:30pm, April 24 at 7:30pm, and April 27 at 3pm and 7:30pm. The theater plans to begin previews on April 28 and to open on schedule on May 8.

TFANA's new production of Wedding Band brings Childress's masterpiece to New York audiences for the first time since 1972, when it made its New York premiere in a production directed by the playwright-an under-acknowledged icon of the American theatre-Joseph Papp. Wedding Band is set in 1918, in Charleston, South Carolina, in a small, protective micro-community of Black women, in which a newcomer reveals a long-term relationship with a white man. The play traces the devoted couple's caustic confrontations with anti-miscegenation laws, vicious family racism, community disapproval, and, finally, deadly disease and their own long-buried feelings.

The cast includes Brittany Bradford as Julia Augustine, Rosalyn Coleman as Lula Green, Veanne Cox as Herman's Mother, Rebecca Haden as Annabelle, Brittany-Laurelle as Mattie, Sofie Nesanelis as Princess, Renrick Palmer as Nelson Green, Phoenix Noelle Reece as Teeta, Thomas Sadoski as Herman, Elizabeth Van Dyke as Fanny Johnson, and Max Woertendyke as Bell Man. The creative team includes Jason Ardizzone-West (Scenic Designer), Qween Jean (Costume Designer), Stacey Derosier (Lighting Designer), Rena Anakwe (Sound Designer), Alphonso Horne (Composer), Nehemiah Luckett (Music Director), Renee Robinson (Movement Director), Andrew Wade (Voice Director), Cherie Corinne Rice (Dialect Coach), Arminda Thomas (Dramaturg), and Jonathan Kalb (TFANA Resident Dramaturg).

TFANA is producing and presenting Wedding Band as part of the residency of CLASSIX, the collective created by Awoye Timpo with Brittany Bradford, A.J. Muhammad, Dominique Rider, and Arminda Thomas, at TFANA. CLASSIX explodes the classical canon through an exploration of Black performance history and dramatic works by Black writers-and proposes an intervention in the current conversation around theatre history

Performances of Wedding Band will now begin April 28, and will run through May 15.