Lives of the Performers
Written by Hilton Als Directed by Peter Born Featuring Helga Davis + Victoire Charles (LA alternate for Okwui Okpokwasili)
11.17.19 / 7:30pm
11.18.19 / 7:30pm
Performances are free and seating is first come first served.
Doors open at 7:00pm.
STRICTLY NO ADMITTANCE AFTER 7:30pm.
LAXART is pleased to present Lives of the Performers, the in-progress, debut play by writer and critic Hilton Als. Still developing through a series of workshops, Lives of the Performers is an experimental narrative examining race, sisterhood, the self, and the forces that threaten to destroy it. This is the first time the play will be workshopped and presented—in its in-progress form—on the West Coast.
Lives of the Performers is loosely based on the life of Sheryl Sutton (b. New Orleans, 1950), an actor in the company of playwright Robert Wilson who starred in many of his greatest works including “Deaf Man’s Glance” (1970) and “Einstein On The Beach” (1976). About the latter, Hilton Als writes, “I grew up—partly—with a recording of the piece, and I listened to it over and over again. I was so taken by Sutton’s voice and intonation that she stayed with me, as did these questions: What was it like for Sutton to be a female person of color in the predominately white male avant-garde back then? What was it like to be Sheryl Sutton?” Drawing on this experience and a biography of Sutton by Hungarian poet Janos Pilinszky (a text that fuses fact and fiction), Als intertwined the factual Sutton with the historical story of June and Jennifer Gibbons; the Gibbons sisters were West Indian twins who grew up in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and ‘70s and developed their own secret language largely as a result of their segregation. By melding these stories, Als doubles the character of Sutton—as embodied through the performances of Helga Davis and Okwui Okpokwasili—to examine, in Als’ words, “how many selves the black female performer must be or become in order to be herself.”
An initial segment of Lives of the Performers was performed in New York in 2017 at a benefit tribute to Als hosted by the non-profit Triple Canopy. This version was expanded for a November 2018 performance at Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This third iteration of the work is hosted by LAXART and will be presented as a work in progress in two public performances. This workshop precedes a full-scale production of the play that will premiere on both coasts in 2020. LAXART will co-present the West Coast premiere in November 2020, in partnership with the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, where a series of painting exhibitions curated by Als is being presented.
Hilton Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for Talk of the Town. He became a staff writer in 1994, a theater critic in 2002, and chief theater critic in 2013. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing, a George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work at The New Yorker in 2017. He is the author of the critically acclaimed White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2014 and a Professor at Columbia University’s Writing Program. He has curated two exhibitions for David Zwirner on the work of Alice Neel and James Baldwin respectively, and is curating a series of three successive exhibitions for the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, of the work of Celia Paul (2018), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (2019), and Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2020). He lives in New York City.
Peter Born is a director, composer, and scenic and lighting designer working in theater, performance, and installation. He most recently collaborated with Okwui Okpokwasili on the work “Sitting on a Man’s Head,” which appeared at the 2019 Counter Current Festival in Houston and at the 2018 Berlin Biennale. Other collaborations with Okpokwasili include “Bronx Gothic” (2013-2019), “Adaku’s Revolt” (2019), “At the Anterior Edge” (2018), “Poor People’s TV Room” (2017), “when I return, who will receive me” (2016), “Poor People’s TV Room (SOLO)” (2015), “pent up: a revenge dance” (2009), as well as an album produced together, “day pulls down the sky” (2019). Three of Peter’s collaborations have garnered New York Dance Performance “Bessie” Awards. He is a former New York public high school teacher, itinerant floral designer, corporate actor-facilitator, video maker, and furniture designer.
Helga Davis served as a principle actor in the 25th-anniversary international revival of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s seminal opera Einstein on the Beach. About this performance, Wilson wrote, “Helga Davis is a beautiful, natural performer with an inner power and strength that is truly unique. She combines voice and movement in a united whole that is spellbinding. Her genius in her stillness and quietness evoke a very deep emotion. She is radiant in every way.” Recent projects include her fifth season appearing in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival; her performance in Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toshi Reagon’s The Parable of the Sower, based on the novel by Octavia E. Butler; and her work First Responder performed at MassMoCA in conjunction with Nick Cave’s exhibition Until. She is a recent recipient of the Greenfield Prize.
Victoire Charles (LA Stand-in for Okwui Okpokwasili) is an actress who has been featured in such films as Gayby, Bobo Noir, In Silent Spaces, and Hurricane. Her theater work includes Hamlet (Missed Mark Productions), There is No More Firmament (Regen Projects), Golden Age (Manhattan Theater Club), The Shipment (Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, Antwerp), and The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare Theater, DC), among many other plays. Charles is a graduate of both Fordham University, The College at Lincoln Center and the New York University Graduate Acting Program.
This workshop of Lives of the Performers is presented through a partnership of LAXART and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Lead support provided by Conor O’Neil.
Curated by Catherine Taft. Special thanks to Adi Nachman and Shaun Regen.