Oakland Theater Project Announces 2022 Season

Oakland Theater Project (OTP)has announced its 2022 Season, In the Eye of the Storm, with five in-person shows at OTP's Oakland Theater at FLAX art & design (1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way), and a sixth show to be announced at a later date, that commemorates the 10-year anniversary since their founding in 2012.

"In each of these plays, meaning and power come to a head," says OTP Co-Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran, "and the motif of the storm manifests literally, figuratively, or as a form of the play itself."

The season kicks off February 11-March 6 with William Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed by OTP Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran. Miranda, the only daughter of a powerful sorcerer, Prospero, recalls a series of supernatural events on a remote island, where her father once orchestrated a maritime storm, shipwrecking a group of travelers. As the survivors begin to encounter strange enchantments on the island, a larger shared history begins to unfold, revealing old secrets, reigniting a struggle for power, and compelling an unavoidable reckoning with the past.

"The production will frame Shakespeare's last play as Miranda's memory so that the play itself becomes a reckoning of both who Prospero is, and of the play itself," says director Michael Socrates Moran. "As such, we hope the reckoning with this play serves as a reckoning for all of us in our time as we wrestle with questions of re-writing our history, who has power to tell whose story, colonization, and the relevance of Shakespeare itself in contemporary America."

Up next from April 8-May 1, OTP will present the West Coast Premiere of Endlings by Celine Song (a finalist for the 2020 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, selected for the 2018 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, and included on the 2017 Kilroys list). On the remote island of Man-Jae, Korea, three elderly women spend their dying days free diving into the ocean to harvest seafood. These haenyeos-"sea women"-are the last practitioners of their millennium-old tradition. On the island of Manhattan, a Korean-Canadian playwright navigates external expectations of how her own identity intersects with the stories she tells. In a magical reflection of the interplay between narrative and identity, this whimsical satire humorously reveals how the stories we tell can obscure entire peoples, and asks: how we are to remove ourselves from an entrapping culture while we simultaneously perpetuate it for our own self-interest?

From June 3-26, OTP presents the first-ever Bay Area production of the 1989 play The Mojo and the Sayso by Aishah Rahman, a writer, professor and active participant in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. A prolific playwright who described her writing style as reflective of a "jazz aesthetic," Rahman was ahead of her time in experimenting with form, mixing magical realism with sharp-edged comedy in a context that copes with unfathomable tragedy in order to reveal the profoundly human cost of racial injustice. Rahman's work was a forebear to Marcus Gardley, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lynn Nottage, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and others that are celebrated today. Her work carries a grounded sensibility of her time congruent with the work of Lorraine Hansberry, but it also risks reflecting back a mystery of the human existence that complicates her form - a complicated form that resonates with our shared reality today.

Based on the 1973 killing of a 10-year-old boy by New York City Police, The Mojo and the Sayso mixes comedy, drama and fantasy in its exploration of devastating loss. The play centers on the Benjamin family, three years after the death of their 10-year-old son Linus at the hands of an off-duty police officer. Father Acts finds escape in repairing and restoring automobiles. Mother Awilda has leaned into her faith and her pastor for solace. Their son Walter, renaming himself Blood, looks to action and violence. As the family revisits their loss, layers of grief unfold-along with new truths and the possibility of healing-in a play full of what the playwright herself termed "absurdity, intimacy and magic mayhem."

From September 2-25, Michael Socrates Moran directs Arthur Miller's Tony Award-winning drama The Crucible. Based on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93, this allegory-originally inspired by Miller's own experiences with McCarthyism-resonates anew in the dynamics of a decentralized, digital society. Reimagined for a contemporary world, the production draws on dance and digital technology as the physical and virtual worlds collide, the roles between observer and observed are blurred, and fear is an ever-present undercurrent.

"As a play that was borne of protest, The Crucible uses the context of one time in history to mirror another," said director Michael Socrates Moran. "This production seeks to do the same, protesting how we often devolve into dehumanization in the name of purity, behind the guise of a digital world. This production asks us to reckon with the universally human impulse to scapegoat another, and what dignity and integrity still cost in today's world."

Next, is the fifth production of the season which will be announced at a later date.

OTP's 2022 Season culminates October 28-November 20 with the World Premiere of Book of Sand (a fairytale) by OTP Associate Artistic Director and award-winning playwright Lisa Ramirez. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' 1975 short story, the tale follows a protagonist who is sold a mysterious book written in an unknown language, with an infinite number of pages-known as the Book of Sand because "neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end." Inspired by magical realism, the tale unfolds as a dreamscape. With each page the protagonist reads, they delve deeper into themselves, confronting one internal world after another. Fascination soon turns to obsession and fear as the protagonist begins to face new facets of their own inner shadow. As the story moves from one magical reality to another, larger questions arise: Where might the end be? How does one arrive at peace within oneself? How could that peace translate to the world at large? And is the obsession with the journey for such peace antithetical to the journey's end?

Oakland Theater Project's 2022 Season, In the Eye of the Storm: Meaning vs. Power is an exploration of hope, meaning, and transformation.

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari writes, "the modern covenant is that we have exchanged meaning for power."

"In picking our 2022 season, we sought plays that offer transformation from a power-oriented experience to one that affords meaning," says OTP Co-Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran. "For me, it often seems like genuine transformation becomes more and more difficult as reckoning with our reality is more and more painful. But I think hope is generated by facing hopelessness head on. I think art has a role to play in how we are able to both reckon with the present and re-imagine new possibilities-and we landed on magical realism as one means by which we can come out the other side of our challenges.

"Each of the shows in the 2022 Season explore the conflict between meaning and power, and the storm such a conflict causes-either within oneself, or among a community. The Tempest begins after a storm, and the magic of the play is the magic of theatre-of storytelling and our history-and the question is whether this magic will lend itself to power or meaning for those who wield it, and those it touches. Endlings asks whether we can glean meaning from those who have been and continue to be victims of power. The Mojo and the Sayso explores a similar question in the aftermath of violence: how do we create meaning when we are rendered powerless in the face of grief? The Crucible explores how meaning can be co-opted for the sake of power. Book of Sand (a fairytale) reveals how the search for meaning can be so overwhelmingly powerful so as to render us powerless.

"As we continue to encounter a tumultuous time, it feels increasingly like we are in the eye of the storm, wrestling with whether or not we can forge an existence where meaning is paramount, or whether we have already resigned ourselves to one where power reigns. We hope theatre has a role to play in offering stories that seek to create meaning from our time."

Oakland Theater Project will present its 2022 Season as indoor performances at the Oakland Theater at FLAX art & design in Oakland (1501 Martin Luther King Jr Way, Oakland). Oakland Theater Project continues its strong commitment to safety for our staff and community, in line with California and Alameda County's COVID-19 guidelines. To promote ongoing safety, audience members will have to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test (within 72 hours) to gain entrance to our theater. Additionally, staff and audiences will be required to wear masks at all times while indoors. OTP's safety protocols can be found at www.oaklandtheaterproject.org/safety.

General admission tickets are $27-$37, assigned seating priority tickets are $52, and pay-what-you-can tickets will be sold online for $10-$20. Due to public health precautions with COVID-19, all tickets will be sold exclusively online until further notice. Tickets can be purchased at oaklandtheaterproject.org.

Oakland Theater Project, formerly Ubuntu Theater Project, seeks to serve and heal the polarization and de-facto segregation in our community. The Oakland Theater Project was founded in 2012 by Michael Socrates Moran, William Hodgson, and Colin Mandlin in Oakland, CA. The Oakland Theater Project produces year-round professional theater for Oakland and the Bay Area is committed to creating compelling works of art that unearth the human condition and unite diverse audiences through revelatory and exquisite theater.

Building on its ongoing tradition of offering pay-what-you-can tickets to every performance, Oakland Theater Project continues its commitment to radical inclusivity with pay-what-you-can subscriptions for the season, with sliding scale tickets for every performance.

To subscribe, donate, or learn more, the public can call 510.646.1126 or visit oaklandtheaterproject.org.

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