Mirror Stage's 11th Season to Launch with AN ISSUE OF BLOOD

Sponsored in part by 4Culture, the 2015-16 season of Mirror Stage's popular Feed Your Mind staged reading series traces commences with An Issue of Blood by Marcus Gardley, on October 24 & 25, 2015 at the Ethnic Cultural Theatre in Seattle's University District. Directed by Suzanne M. Cohen, Feed Your Mind: An Issue of Blood features Marlette Buchanan, Ian Fraser, Reginald André Jackson, Pilar O'Connell, Shaunyce Omar, and Tyler Trerise.

It's 1676-before Ferguson, before Selma, even before slavery-a time when class, not color, defined a person's destiny, and a country not yet a country might have gone in another direction. Former indentured servant Negro Mary earned her freedom and now owns a profitable tobacco plantation in Jamestown, Virginia, though she is convinced her family and land are cursed. Her plans to avert disaster are thwarted by an interracial love triangle, an imminent rebellion, and a crime of passion. Playwright Marcus Gardley looks to a pivotal moment in our collective past to understand how we arrived in our tumultuous present.

Marcus Gardley is a poet-playwright who is the current recipient of the 2015 Glickman Award. He was the 2013 James Baldwin Fellow and the 2011 PEN Laura Pels award winner for Mid-Career Playwright. His play The House that Will Not Stand was commissioned and produced by Berkeley Rep with subsequent productions at Yale Rep and in London. Gardley is an ensemble member playwright at Victory Gardens Theater where his play The Gospel of Lovingkindness was produced in March 2014 and won the 2015 BTAA award for best play. Other scripts include The Road Weeps, the Well Runs Dry about the migration of Black Seminoles from Florida to Oklahoma, which had a national tour in 2014. Every Tongue Confess premiered at Arena Stage and was a recipient of the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. His musical On The Levee premiered at LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater and this past July, Sound Theatre and Brownbox Theatre co-produced ...And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi in Seattle. He is the recipient of the 2011 Aetna New Voice Fellowship at Hartford Stage, the Helen Merrill Award, a Kellsering Honor and the Gerbode Emerging Playwright Award. Gardley holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale Drama School and is a member of New Dramatists, The Dramatists Guild, and The Lark Play Development Center. He is a professor of Playwriting at Brown University.

Performance offers unique ways of knowing that can challenge entrenched paradigms, contribute to pluralism and expand the range of meaningful action. Mirror Stage's innovative Feed Your Mind series of staged readings examines topical issues from different perspectives. Presented without costumes or sets, the emphasis on the text encourages audiences to create their own imagined world inhabited by the play's characters. Following every performance, a moderated discussion with the audience and artists explores the issues raised in more depth. An Issue of Blood critically examines systems of oppression and racial inequity dating as far back as colonial America, using our history to shed harsh light on our country's struggle with race, discrimination, and police brutality.

The Ethnic Cultural Theatre is located at 3940 Brooklyn Ave NE in Seattle. Performances will be Saturday at 8:00pm and Sunday at 2:00pm. Admission is $15; $10 for students and seniors. Every performance has 10 Pay-What-You-Can rush tickets ($1 minimum). Free parking is available in University of Washington's lot W12, located at just south of the Ethnic Cultural Theater on Brooklyn Ave NE. For more information, please visit www.mirrorstage.org/issueofblood.

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