A SAMUEL FRENCH, INC. TITLE
What to Send Up When It Goes Down
Full-Length Play, Drama / 4w, 4m
What to Send Up When it Goes Down is a community ritual created in response to the deaths of Black people as a result of racialized violence.
Image: 2018 Movement Theater Company Production (Ahron R. Foster)
-
Cast Size
4w, 4m -
Duration
120 minutes (2 hours) -
Target Audience
Adult, Teen (Age 14-18)
Details
Summary
As lines between characters and actors – as well as observers and observed – blur, a dizzying series of vignettes builds to a climactic moment in which performance and reality collide, highlighting the absurdity of anti-Blackness in our society. Through facilitation and dialogue we must decide how to cope, resist and move forward.
Watch playwright Aleshea Harris and director Whitney White discuss What to Send Up When it Goes Down in the June 2021 session of Concord Theatricals' Read More Plays Club.
History
Cast Attributes
Keywords
Performing Groups
- Additional Features Audience Participation/Interactive, Play with Music
- Duration 120 minutes (2 hours)
- Cautions
- Intense Adult Themes
Media
“An electric, uncompromising, and powerfully moving work that will rock you to your core.” – The Boston Globe
“If you’re a lover of theater, looking for signs of fresh and original and in-the-moment life on the American stage, you need to see What to Send Up.” – The New York Times
“This is theatre as art, exorcism, balm, and battle cry.” – The New Yorker
“Harris created something that is as much a church service as it is a production — a goad to action, a place for fellowship, a series of spiky parables that teach the congregation.” – Helen Shaw, New York Magazine
Videos
RMPC: Aleshea Harris and Whitney White on WTSU
-
What to Send Up - Public TheaterNY Promo
-
What to Send Up - ART Promo
-
What to Send Up - 2016 Promo
Photos
Image: 2018 Movement Theater Company Production (Ahron R. Foster)
Image: 2018 Movement Theater Company Production (Ahron R. Foster)
Licensing & Materials
- Minimum Fee: £55 per performance plus VAT when applicable.
Authors
Aleshea Harris
Aleshea Harris’s play Is God Is (directed by Taibi Magar at Soho Rep and Ola Ince at the Royal Court) won the 2016 Relentless Award, an Obie Award for playwriting in 2017, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award in 2019 and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. What ...