March 17th – 19th
Sound Theatre Company is an organization that puts its money where its mouth is. The group is tightly thematic, social justice-focused, and works to center disabled stories and artists. Its dedication to chronicling the human experience has led to four Gregory Awards for Outstanding Theatre of Year.
To launch its three-show 2023 season (dubbed “New Era, New Canon”), Sound Theatre is keeping it local with a staged reading of 11th & Pine (a working title). Written by UW Assistant Playwriting Professor Nikki Yeboah and directed by Leah Adcock-Starr (with the help of eight UW researchers and dramaturg Oona Hatton), it’s an oral history of the 2020 Capitol Hill Organized/Occupied Protest (CHOP) based on interviews with 30 local community members who were there as it all went down, with police reports and media coverage assisting the framework. The readings will be at the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway, just around the corner from where the autonomous zone happened.
“We are still shaped by CHOP and will be for many years to come, so we must seek to understand it as a community,” said Sound co-artistic director Theresa 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.”
With Sound’s advertised radical inclusion ticket pricing, the hope is to make this show accessible to all (to wit: every performance will have captions and ASL interpretation), and the proceedings will also offer attendees “different forms of healing, reflection, solo, and group processing throughout the weekend.” It’s one of Seattle’s most defining moments in recent history, and Sound is the right organization to preserve its memory with nuance and care.
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