Playwright and oral historian Nikki Yeboah’s ethnodrama summons a memory still fresh in Seattle: CHOP/CHAZ
SEATTLE, WA — Sound Theatre’s latest presentation hits close to home in 11TH & PINE, the working title of playwright Nikki Yeboah’s incisive new play that takes us into the beating heart of Seattle’s 2020 protests. In a uniquely community-engaged development process, interviews with 30 local community members form the backbone of a story about a group of strangers who came together to fight against the system in hopes of creating lasting change.
Two and half years after the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), Sound Theatre will present a limited engagement (March 17, 18, and 19) public staged reading about its undoing – while also offering attendees different forms of healing, reflection, solo, and group processing throughout the weekend. Leah Adcock-Starr will direct.
11TH & PINE is the living product of a unique ethnodrama process – with Yeboah and a team of eight University of Washington researchers weaving in first-person accounts of protestors, community members, police reports, and media as source material for the play. Located at Erickson Theatre Off-Broadway within the six city blocks that formed the month-long autonomous zone, the reading is meters away from being classified as a site-specific play.
“11TH & PINE gets to the heart of the uniquely localized circumstances that gave birth to this incredible movement. The development process unfolded with the intention of seeking more expansive ways to include the community in creative processes that mirror their experiences back to them,” said Yeboah. “It began with interviews, then later as most traditional plays do, with me working alongside dramaturg Oona Hatton, and director Leah Adcock-Starr to develop the script. However, what sets this play apart from more traditional works is not only that it started by collecting oral histories but also what happened after the initial draft was written.”
In the vein of plays like SWEAT (by Lynn Nottage), 11TH & PINE takes an ethnodrama rather than verbatim theatre presentation of narratives derived from interviews.
In a series of February private table reads with the CHOP community members whose stories are featured in the play, “the open, honest conversations that followed shaped my subsequent drafts and guided my ongoing creative process, eventually culminating in this final version and a series of public readings open to the larger Seattle public,” said Yeboah.
Yeboah’s other work includes The (M)others, an oral history performance about four women brought together after losing a loved one to police violence.
“We are still shaped by CHOP and will be for many years to come, so we must seek to understand it as a community. Nikki is brilliant, thorough, and nuanced in her multifaceted exploration of the major events and the complex dynamics of this moment in Seattle’s history,” said co-artistic director Teresa Thuman. “The ultimate goal is for Seattle’s theatre community to hold ongoing space for this essential Seattle story – a story that requires extra care and awareness in its development process and presentation.”
CHOP/CHAZ, acronyms known in Seattle and nationally, left behind a thousand narratives – and equally as many unresolved questions. As recent news cycles about Tyre Nichols serve a searing dose of déjà vu, Yeboah’s play prompts the questions left unanswered after CHOP: What will it take to end the cycle of police brutality against Black bodies? How can we reconcile larger systems and internal conflicts – in order to foster true community healing? 11TH & PINE (working title), a play written for Seattle’s citizenry, invites you to explore the questions. For ticketing details, visit https://soundtheatrecompany.org/2023-season/11th-pine/
Press Contact: Aimee Chou (she/hers)
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