At this week’s INSTITUTE FOR THEATRE AND SOCIAL CHANGE CONFERENCE, Bryonn Bain will give the keynote address A DIALOGUE ON RADICAL FICTIONS and join an opening night panel including authors Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, Jody Armour, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Brent Blair.

The conference will feature a performance of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “brilliantly crafted” play AN OCTOROON.

“From Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon, about a white Southerner who falls in love with a mixed-race woman, Jacobs-Jenkins fashioned a kind of theatre-essay, whose parentheses are filled with dialogue about performing blackness, the theatre as a live art, and the basic concerns that haunt the thinking mind trapped in a body that’s defined by skin color, gender, or speech: life makes each of us a target for someone else. AN OCTOROON isn’t just an alternative to the irony-free ‘black American theatre’ of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson; it’s part of it—and part of many other things, too, because Jacobs-Jenkins’s surrealism grows out of naturalism, the strange circumstances that make us open our mouths, hoping to be heard, even as we forget to listen.” — Hilton Als*

 

INSTITUTE FOR THEATER AND SOCIAL CHANGE CONFERENCE

Thursday through Saturday, April 12, 13, and 14.

CAAM, USC, and the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center

 

A DIALOGUE ON RADICAL FICTIONS

Thursday, April 12, at 7 pm.

CAAM, 600 State Drive, Expo Park, Los Angeles.

 

AN OCTOROON

Friday, April 13, at 7 pm.

CAAM, 600 State Drive, Expo Park, Los Angeles.

 

BRYONN BAIN—LYRICS FROM LOCKDOWN

Saturday, April 14, at 8 pm.

Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, 4708 West Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles.

 

*Hilton Als, “God Only Knows,” The New Yorker, March 6, 2017.

Image credit below: Berkeleyside.