Is You Is at Broadway Rose Theater Company

Broadway Rose is pleased to partner with Bag&Baggage Productions (B&B) to present a concert workshop reading of the new musical IS YOU IS by Chicago-based playwright and lyricist L.C. Bernadine, Seattle-based jazz musician Erik Olsen, and producing artistic director of B&B, Nik Whitcomb.

About the show: Steenie Mayfield is working as a school bath attendant in a 1930s “social hygiene” program providing weekly school baths for students with no plumbing at home. She is desperate to move up the ranks and fulfill her dream of teaching, despite the obstacles for Black teachers and the challenges of the Depression. An offer to visit the famous Field Museum and possibly model for the sculptor working on the newly opened but still-expanding “The Races of Mankind” exhibit seems to present an opportunity, but any thoughts Steenie had of being seen differently are crushed by a disastrous visit to the Museum with a handful of students.

What became of Steenie and whether or not she was one of the unidentified models for “racial types” featured in the exhibit becomes the obsession of two modern day museum interns nearly 90 years later, when they are pulled into a project to restore some of the statues from the exhibit. Their assignment to “restore” becomes a fight to re-story as they are drawn into the legacy of the exhibit which fed false notions of race to millions for decades.

This show is presented in a concert reading that will feature a cast of local Oregon artists, an expanded jazz band, and mark the first collaboration between Washington County's two resident professional theatres. Learn more about Bag&Baggage Productions.

Get your tickets now:

Saturday, October 19 at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, October 20 at 2:00 p.m. with post-show talkback

Saturday, October 26 at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, October 27 at 2:00 p.m.