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The Negro Ensemble Company will ensure Penn Live Arts’ 50th anniversary season is lit

Penn Arts Live and the Negro Ensemble Company are asking playwrights to submit one-act scripts grounded in the Black experience. The open call will run from April 1 to April 30.

In the world premiere of "Vessels," co-shaped and co-produced by Rebecca Mwase and Ron Regin, seven women explored the transcendental possibilities of music during the Middle Passage. Set in an interactive, sculptural environment that invoked those infamous ships, this interdisciplinary, speculative history work explored singing as a survival tool. Presented by the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, March 7, 2019.
In the world premiere of "Vessels," co-shaped and co-produced by Rebecca Mwase and Ron Regin, seven women explored the transcendental possibilities of music during the Middle Passage. Set in an interactive, sculptural environment that invoked those infamous ships, this interdisciplinary, speculative history work explored singing as a survival tool. Presented by the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, March 7, 2019.Read moreKyle Kielinski

In celebration of its 50th anniversary season, Penn Live Arts is partnering with the Negro Ensemble Company for a dynamic 2022-2023 residency.

The residency is three-pronged: It includes a one-act play festival in October and the world premiere of a yet-to-be named stage production directed by Insecure actress and NAACP best director winner Denise Dowse. This work will debut next February and juxtaposes the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s with that of today.

The third piece of the residency will include workshops for students and Philadelphians facilitated by Negro Ensemble Company artists and Penn’s English and Africana Studies professor, Herman Beavers.

To get the party started, Penn Live Arts and the Negro Ensemble Company are asking playwrights from all over the world to submit one-act scripts grounded in the Black experience. The open call will run from April 1 to April 30. A 20-person jury will pick three scripts in June for Penn Live Arts and the Negro Ensemble Company to produce in October for its Our Voices, Our Time one-act play festival.

“When you look at Philadelphia, you have lots of theater, but there hasn’t been a ton of activity or support of Black theater,” said Christopher Gruits, Penn Live Arts’ executive and artistic director. “This is an exciting way to bring in Black playwrights, Black actors, and support great Black storytelling.”

The city’s first performing arts center was started at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. The Annenberg Center has served as the main theater for the performing arts center’s productions, but the center has had several names including Penn Presents, Annenberg Center Live, and now Penn Live Arts. It is celebrating its 50th birthday as Penn Live Arts.

The institution has counted itself a supporter of Black theater for decades. August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was workshopped at the Annenberg Center before its 1984 Broadway debut. Yet, Gruits said, in light of movements like We See You, White American Theatre that demanded more equitable treatment for actors of color, it was time for Penn Live to deepen its commitment to Black storytelling.

“We wanted to build on a legacy that we had,” Gruits said. “But we also wanted to reimagine what our current story could look like.”

» READ MORE: Actors of color in lead roles help Broadway shows like ‘Oklahoma!’ reflect reality

Late last year, Gruits reached out to Karen Brown, artistic director and executive producer of the Negro Ensemble Company. Perhaps these two legacy organizations could work together?

The answer was a resounding yes.

“The arrangement was mutually beneficial,” Brown said. “Penn has its own prestige and it gives us the ability to reach a broader market and do more travel than we’ve been able to do in a while.”

The Negro Ensemble Company was founded in 1967 by actor Robert Hooks, playwright Douglas Turner Ward, and theater manager Gerald Krone. It was created to not just tell a broad range of Black stories, but also to give actors the opportunity to play characters other than maids, butlers, and enslaved people.

“It was an answer to the dismal representation of Black stories on stage, film, and television,” Brown said.

In 1981, the Negro Ensemble Company produced Philadelphia-born playwright Charles Fuller’s Tony-Award-winning drama A Soldier’s Play, starring Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. The play would become a 1984 movie, A Solder’s Story, also starring Washington. Phylicia Rashad, John Amos, Adolph Caesar, and the late Sherman Hemsley are among the many Black actors who have been a part of the company.

The residency will be funded in part by a $40,000 grant from The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania. An ArtsForward grant, a gift from the Association for Performing Arts courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will total $50,000. ArtsForward is a new program to support the theater industry’s safe, vibrant, and equitable reopening and recovery.

“We are very excited about the reopening of the theater scene,” Brown said. “Theater is the art form where writers can really say what’s on their soul.”