'Citizen: An American Lyric' - world premiere stage adaptation at Fountain

LOS ANGELES - July 10, 2015 - PRLog -- A provocative meditation on race fusing poetry, prose, movement, music and the video image. Shirley Jo Finney directs the world premiere of Stephen Sachs’ stage adaptation of Claudia Rankine’s internationally acclaimed book of poetry about everyday acts of racism in America (winner, National Book Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Times Book Award, NAACP Image Award; PEN Open Book Award).

Sachs, a prolific playwright who is also co-artistic director of the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, immediately recognized the inherent theatricality of Rankine’s book.

“I kept thinking to myself: this could be a play, this could be a play,” he says. “The Fountain has been looking to create a new work that gives voice to the national conversation on race in America. We want to speak out in response to what's happening right now in Los Angeles and across the country, in the present tense. And although ‘Citizen’ is a book of poetry, not a play, I knew right away it could make an important, thought-provoking and provocative theater piece.”

The New Yorker called Citizen “brilliant… explores the kinds of injustice that thrive when the illusion of justice is perfected,”and The New York Times wrote that “Rankine brilliantly pushes poetry’s forms to disarm readers and circumvent our carefully constructed defense mechanisms against the hint of possibly being racist ourselves.”

Made up of remarks, glances, seeming slips of the tongue — those did-that-really-just-happen-did-they-really-just say-that slurs that happen every day, as well as the larger incidents that become national firestorms — the stage adaptation of Citizen is a spoken word dramatic collage, a meditation, or as Rankine herself calls it, “an American lyric.”

To get to the heart of the issues exposed in the play, Finney explains, it must be personal.

“This piece is an interior, stream-of-consciousness dreamscape that viscerally plugs into the collective truth,” she says. “The actors need to bring a piece of themselves to it, really have the conversation that is on the page. It’s cellular, lives in the soul of our DNA, bypasses the mind. These are words that if you thought about them first, you wouldn’t say them.”

Citizen: An American Lyric opens on Saturday, Aug. 1 and continues through Sept. 14, with performances on Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.; and Mondays at 8 p.m. Four preview performances take place on Saturday, July 25 at 8 p,m.; Sunday, July 26 at  3 p.m. Thursday, July 30 at 8 p.m.; and Friday, July 26 at 8 p.m. Tickets range from Pay-What-You-Can at every Monday performance to $15–$34.95 on the weekends. The Fountain Theatre is located at 5060 Fountain Avenue (at Normandie) in Los Angeles.Secure, on-site parking is available for $5. The Fountain Theatre is air-conditioned and wheelchair accessible. For reservations and information, call (323) 663-1525 or go to www.FountainTheatre.com.