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Source: Marilena Katsini
Ten weeks of free theater, designed to spark conversation about some of today’s most urgent issues, will be coming to Brooklyn this spring.
Building on longstanding and extensive support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), Theater of War Productions, in conjunction with Brooklyn Public Library, today announced a ten-week run of their original project Antigone in Ferguson with further exclusive support from the Foundation.
The 50 free performances will take place at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn between May 8th and July 13th, 2019. The venue can accommodate 800 people, giving thousands of people free access to powerful theater over the course of the run.
Created in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in 2014, Antigone in Ferguson intertwines excerpts from Sophocles’ Antigone with music from a rotating chorus of activists, police officers, and others from Harlem and the St. Louis area. This ten-week run follows a five-week run of free performances of Antigone in Ferguson at Harlem Stage in 2018. The production was previously staged as part of SNF’s annual Summer Nostos Festival in Athens, Greece in 2017.
“Theater of War recognizes that theater can have the greatest impact when it is treated not as a product, but as a process, as an experience, one that meaningfully engages its audience,” said SNF Co-President Andreas Dracopoulos. “Antigone in Ferguson is a perfect example of this, demonstrating the incomparable value of theater in opening conversations among a broad public where traditional dialogue falls short. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation is proud to support this critical work.”
Using stories from the realms of Classics and the classics, Theater of War engages communities in discussion of pressing, sometimes taboo, contemporary issues, from elder care, to the refugee crisis, to mental health, to racial injustice.
In addition to the Antigone in Ferguson performances, Theater of War will debut two new works in 2019, The King Lear Project and The Suppliants. This expanded Theater of War programming builds on a two-year stint by Artistic Director Brian Doerries as Public Artist in Residence at the NYC Department of Veterans’ Services, for which SNF also provided significant support.