The play “unFRAMED” returns to Manhattan for five performances in June as part of the solo NOVA Arts Festival at Off-Broadway’s New Ohio Theatre (154 Christopher Street, inside the landmark Archive Building). Performances begin Monday, June 4 and continue through Saturday, June 16.
The play takes the audience into the artist’s studio where Iyaba Ibo Mandingo tells the story of his life as an immigrant in America.
Meanwhile, Double Play Connections and Doing Life Productions, Jane Dubin, executive producer, and Director Brent Buell, collaborators on Antigua-born poet, author, painter, and playwright Mandingo’s “unFRAMED: A Man in Progress,” have been fostering relationships and communication by participating in community driven programming.
Dubin, Buell and Mandingo have stepped outside the theater to “continue the conversation we start with this powerful show,” says Dubin, a TONY award-winning producer.
The three have been seen connecting with many different communities – making African masks with an afterschool class in Newburgh, N.Y.; writing poetry with the women in residence and the high school girls at the YWCA White Plains; to presenting the play to more than 200 prisoners and staff inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
According to Mandingo, “unFRAMED has allowed me the opportunity to continue my work as a master teaching artist with an entirely new group of students, such as the women and girls of the YWCA in White Plains and the adult students of the Literacy Volunteers of Stamford and Greenwich. The added visibility has also afforded me wonderful performing opportunities too, like participating in the World Aids Day concert in New London, CT, or participating in the first ever Westchester Poetry Festival, or being a part of the Caribbean Art celebration at Lincoln Center this summer.”
“I taught in Sing Sing and other New York maximum security prisons for 10 years and witnessed the transformative power of theater,” reflects director Buell. “I am proud to be directing Iyaba Ibo Mandingo’s unFRAMED because its powerful message does outside the walls what I’m so proud happened inside: it changes people.”
unFRAMED plays the following schedule as part of the solo NOVA Arts Festival:
Monday, June 4 at 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 9 at 7:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 10 at 4:00 p.m.
Wednesday, June 13 at 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 16 at 9:00 p.m.
Tickets are available online at www.terranovacollective.org or directly at http://bit.ly./unFRMAEDtixatSOLONOVA. Tickets may also be purchased in-person at Box Office ½ hour in advance of the performances.
Running Time: 85 minutes, no intermission
Website: www.terranovacollective.org
