Zharia O’Neal.
SEATTLE: Sound Theatre has named Los Angeles playwright Zharia O’Neal the inaugural recipient of their new Making Waves William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Playwright Residency. Chosen out of 120 candidates from across the nation, O’Neal will obtain a $10,000 stipend, journey and housing reimbursement, and Sound Theatre’s in-house assist in growing a brand new play. The residency is known as for the legendary late Native playwright.
“This new residency program will provide an opportunity for the playwright, Sound Theatre Company, and our community to focus on how theatremaking can benefit from engaging in tough conversations,” mentioned Janet Hayatshahi, incoming professor of performing at Seattle University, in a press release. “Zharia is a force. Her dynamism is apparent both in her writing and in how she speaks about creating story. She is driven by ways to articulate stories that look beyond traditional forms, questioning existing values and structures, breaking their rigid edges and allowing in a viewpoint different than the one anticipated.”
Through the residency O’Neal will work on Roost, a comedy about Black ladies’s expertise and relationship with actuality tv, media illustration, respectability politics, and hotep-ery. The residency will embrace a neighborhood studying that may welcome suggestions in December 2022, and can result in a public staged studying in March 2023. O’Neal can even be educating a playwriting course beginning January 2023 for college kids from underserved communities. which can culminate in a 10-minute play competition. The residency will take a hybrid format with Zoom and in-person occasions positioned in Seattle.
“William S. Yellow Robe Jr. spoke in an interview about having to fill cultural knowledge gaps and fight Native stereotypes in the development process before he could even begin the necessary work on his play,” mentioned O’Neal in a press release. “That’s the insidiousness of monolithic structures—there’s so much to work through before you can begin your work. Creating diverse, culturally informed rooms gives us less to work through before we can get to the work. The room around a play builds it, so fill it wisely…The truth is, if you want to develop stories from BIPOC, intersectional playwrights that speak to their dynamic, kaleidoscopic experiences, you cannot require them to be told in a certain manner, shape, and structure that is familiar or comfortable to you—that will ‘promise ticket sales.’”
O’Neal is a poet, playwright, and multi-medium storyteller from the British Virgin Islands. She identifies as an Afro-Caribbean Queer playwright. Her works embrace the blood of hibiscus, Seven Stage Circle, and a poetry assortment, rottincrop.
Finalists for this residency will obtain honoraria, and they’re Alex Chand of Southlake, Texas, whose pattern, Avonte Oquendo, advised the story of a 14-year-old autistic pupil in Queens, N.Y., who went lacking from college in 2013; Zachariah Ezer of Austin, who wrote The Stones of Life, a courtroom drama about māhū (a pre-colonial third gender) and the pōpolo (Black Hawaiians) in Nineteen Seventies Honolulu; Kennedy Dawson Healy of Chicago, whose pattern Care is a musical about 4 disabled folks and their care employees; and Wind Dell Woods of Tacoma, Wash., whose Aaliyah within the Underland is a hip-hop remix/Black feminist subversion of Alice in Wonderland.
The Making Waves Yellow Robe residency is being supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Seattle Office of Economic Development’s Neighborhood Economic Recovery Fund, and the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation.
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