I Gotta Home and It’s Morning by Shirley Graham Du Bois
Join us for an On Her Shoulders Reading of I Gotta Home and It’s Morning (1939) by Shirley Graham Du Bois AND our 34th birthday party!
I Gotta Home and It’s Morning (1939)
by Shirley Graham Du Bois
Directed by laura e. johnston; Dramaturgy by Ashley M. Thomas
Thursday, June 18th, 6:00pm @ New Perspectives Studio (458 West 37 Street @ 10th Avenue)
On Her Shoulders is pleased to present a staged reading of I Gotta Home and It’s Morning by Shirley Graham Du Bois on Thursday, June 18th. Laura e. johnston directs. Doors open at 5:45pm for a 6:00pm start with The Play in Context introduction by Ashley M. Thomas, who situates the script in its historical time and place, followed by the reading and a post-performance NPTC Birthday Party (34 years).
Admission is $20. The performance and party is at New Perspectives Studio, 458 West 37 Street @ 10th Avenue.
Shirley Graham Du Bois (Playwright) was a nationally recognized playwright, composer, author and activist. She was also the second wife of activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Graham Du bois was a prominent figure in African American theatre and known for her composition of all-Black operas. During her lifetime she was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Prize for her work on Your Most Humble Servant, a biography of Benjamin Banneker and she was awarded the prestigious Julien Messner Award for her biography of Frederick Douglass, titled There was Once a Slave. She was born Lola Shirley Graham Jr. on November 11th, 1896 to Reverend David A. Graham and Elizabeth Etta Bell Graham in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was one of six children, and the only girl among them. In 1926, Graham moved to Paris, France, to study music composition at the Sorbonne. Her exposure there to African and Afro-Caribbean people inspired her to begin composing Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro, which premiered as a full opera in Cleveland in 1932.
“I Gotta Home” and “It’s Morning” were both written in 1939 while Graham Du Bois was the head of the Chicago Unit of the Federal Theatre Project. It's Morning follows Cissie, a desperate mother suffering during slavery in the U.S. South in 1862, deciding whether it's better for her child to live enslaved or die free. Often credited as a forerunner of Toni Morrison's Beloved, this play explores grief and the sacrifices a mother makes for her children. I Gotta Home, a comedy, follows Reverend Cobb and his large family as they try to make ends meet in 1938. When his long-lost sister appears with an inherited fortune, the family is sent into a tailspin.
LAURA E. JOHNSTON (Director) is an actor, director and producer. Her directing credits include Artificial Light (SPARK Theatre Fest-Spring), Whitewashed (Brownstone Steps Entertainment), Coco Queens (UP Theater: Dark of Winter Reading Series), African Folk Tales (TheatreWorks USA). Asst. Director: American Captives by Connie Winston (Dixon Place), I Made it to the Moon by Karen Campion (Broadway Bound Theatre Fest at AMT). She p[roduced Life on the Mississippi (The WorkShop Theatre—NYIT Nominee) and has numerous acting credits in NYC and Regionally.
ASHLEY M. THOMAS (Dramaturg) If June Ambrose and James Baldwin had a baby, it’d be Ashley M. Thomas. Born and bred in Harlem, NY, Ashley is an artist whose work—spanning plays, poems, creative criticism, and short stories — centers on Black life from the mundane to the surreal. She’s a proud alumna of the First Wave Urban Arts Scholarship at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she graduated with her Bachelor of Social Work. She also holds an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama. Ashley is a Libra Sun, Aries Rising, and Taurus Moon.