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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Theatre Department
Presents “The Darker Face of the Earth” on the Mainstage KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s (UMKC) Theatre Department will present “The Darker Face of the Earth,” directed by artistic director Ricardo Khan and written by Rita Dove, playwright and former Poet Laureate of the United States. The production begins with the preview on Saturday, Nov. 5, and opens on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005. “The Darker Face of the Earth” was chosen as the production for the inaugural benefit, La Comédie UMKC!, on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 7:30 p.m. at the Performing Arts Center, Spencer Theatre, 4949 Cherry Street. “The Darker Face of the Earth” is the retelling of the Oedipus tale set in ante-bellum South Carolina. It demonstrates how Dove expressed the fatalistic condition of man in the Sophocles’ myth and the consequences of an event, such as slavery in America. The cast will consist of African-American UMKC Theatre students and alumni. Khan is currently on campus directing rehearsals for the production. According to Khan, the play depicts characters of the American South on the Jennings Plantation – some born into freedom, some into slavery; some from Africa, some from the West Indies, and some from Europe and the French territories of the new world. “Regardless of their origins, (they) fall victim to the inhumanity, just as, in my opinion, all of us today, regardless of color, still in some way, suffer from the consequences of a country’s unhealed legacy of slavery.” Khan is the co-founder and artistic director of the Crosslands Theatre Company of New Brunswick, N.J., one of the nation’s most acclaimed African-American theater companies in history and 1999 recipient of the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater. Khan conceived and directed the award-winning “Black Eagles,” about the Tuskegee Airmen of WWII and a musical on the life of Nelson Mandela, which he workshopped in South Africa and premiered at the Crossroads Theatre Company in 2004. Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993-1995 and won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection, “Thomas and Beulah.” She has received more than 20 honorary doctorates and numerous other honors, including the Library Lion and Literary Lion citations from the New York Humanities Medal from the White House and the 1997 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. Tickets for the performances can be purchased at the Central Ticket Office at (816) 235-6222 or by visiting www.umkc.edu/theatre (see Playbill). Performance dates and times are:
Previews:
Opens Events
Inaugural Benefit – La
Comédie UMKC! –
Theatre Department’s
benefit
Special Event – Theatre
Training Institute: This information is available to people with speech or hearing impairments by calling Relay Missouri at (800) 735-2966 (TT) or (800) 735-2466 (voice). “The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), one of four University of Missouri campuses, is a public university serving more than 14,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students. UMKC engages with the community and economy based on a three-part mission: visual and performing arts, health sciences, and urban affairs.”
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