“Saviour?” a provocative new drama plays a limited engagement at the Dwyer Cultural Center, 258 St. Nicholas Avenue at 123rd Street between St. Nicholas Ave. & Frederick Douglass Blvd., through Sunday, Oct. 30.
The play written by Esther Armah and produced by New Heritage Theatre Group and Take Wing And Soar Productions tells a love story about white privilege, Black women, sex, betrayal, and power and is directed by Passion.
“Saviour?” features acclaimed actors Michael Green and Jimmy Aquino*. It tells the story of two men engaged in a game of high stakes. Billy Hall (Aquino) is a white high profile New York activist who sues his company when a promised promotion as CEO is given to a Black woman. He hires Michael Jamal Williams III (Green), an African-American attorney – willing to win at any cost – who needs the case as a career-changer.
Power, passion, family, ambition, love, betrayal, white men, Black women, white privilege: it’s all on the table in this play that asks: Who saves who?
“Saviour?” is a roller coaster drama love story with twists and turns. In the age of Obama, post racial means as a playwright I get to look at white privilege, white identity – this emotional, complicated thing and its relationship to power and blackness through this lens as a Black woman,” states Armah.
“This play will open up a conversation not about blackness, but about white America’s intimate identity association with power, emotionality and race. That’s something that is just not talked about enough. Race is almost always about Black and brown folk, and the question of how racist white folk are or are not. This is more complicated, messier, nuanced than that. ”
Armah is a playwright, an award-winning international journalist, an author and radio host. Her first play was “Can I Be Me?,” a one-woman show adapted from her book by the same name.
Her second play “Forgive Me?” debuted in 2008 at The Roger Furman Playreading Series where it broke audience attendance records for this prestigious play-reading series. It was then selected for the September 2008 Urban Stages Playreading Series and appeared on Mainstage Theatre, produced by Take Wing And Soar Productions, in July and August 2009’s Midtown International Theatre Festival.
Armah has also worked in print, radio and television media primarily for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the UK and Africa for more than a decade.
Directions:
Train: A, B, C or D
Bus: M3, M10, M101, BX15, M60 Exit 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue; walk two blocks south on St. Nicholas Avenue; turn left onto 123rd Street
Dates:
Friday, Oct. 28 ∙ 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, Oct. 29 ∙ 7:00 p.m.
Sunday, Oct. 30 ∙ 3:00 p.m.
*Denotes Member of AEA
