Updated March 2010

New York

Freed, formerly titled Free Man of Color, will premiere at 59E59 on June 11th, 2010, and will run through July 3rd, , 2010. Freed is the story of John Newton Templeton, an ex-slave who attended Ohio University and graduated in 1828, thirty-five years before the end of slavery. This award-winning play was commissioned by Ohio University in honor of the Ohio University Bicentennial Celebration and received its World Premiere production at the Tony Award-winning Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. In the play, John Newton Templeton has to come to terms with the reason why he was chosen to be “the first” and then uses that event to explore the differences between training, education, and assimilation in America.

Australia

Les Trois Dumas will receive its Australian Premiere at the Independent Theatre in Adelaide, South Australia. Les Trois Dumas explores the lives of three generations of the Dumas family: the prolific French-African writer and author of The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas père; his son and author of La Dame aux Camellias, Alexandre Dumas fils; and the father Thomas Dumas who was one of Napoleon's most prized generals. Les Trois Dumas was originally commissioned and produced by the Indiana Repertory Theatre.

New York

Knock Me a Kiss will premiere at the New Federal Theatre, produced by Woodie King and Legacy Productions. Knock Me a Kiss is set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance in the late 1920’s. It is based upon the true story of Yolande DuBois, daughter of W.E.B. DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP. Even though Yolande was rumored to be in love with bandleader Jimmy Lunceford, Yolande married Countee Cullen, one of the leading African American poets of the Harlem Renaissance. W.E.B. Du Bois, who encouraged the union, called the wedding “the symbolic march of young and black America ... it was a new race, a new thought, a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world.” However, Countee Cullen was rumored to be gay, and two months after the wedding, Countee sailed to Paris with the best man from the wedding, Harold Jackman, leaving Yolande, his young bride, behind. The play ultimately explores the struggle between our personal commitment to fulfill individual hopes and dreams, versus our obligation to contribute to a greater public good, especially at a time when the need for a greater public good was dire. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote of Knock Me a Kiss, “In one blistering scene after another – with dialogue that is alternately highly poetic, down-and-dirty, eerily disturbing and fiercely authoritarian – Smith exposes the lies and the blazing truths that animate his characters.”

World Premiere in Indianapolis and Chicago

The Gospel According to James, is based upon the August 1930 double lynching in Marion, Indiana that has been immortalized by the now iconic Lawrence Beitler photograph. The play depicts a fictional meeting between the man who survived the double lynching, James Cameron, and the woman who claimed to have been raped but later recanted, Mary Ball. As they recount the events of that night, the play uses the lynching as a fulcrum to explore how shifting memory has created what now appears to be an immutable history. The play was commissioned by the Indiana Repertory Theatre through funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Joyce Foundation. The Joyce Foundation’s mission is to support “efforts to protect the natural environment of the Great Lakes, to reduce poverty and violence in the region, and to ensure that its people have access to good schools, decent jobs, and a diverse and thriving culture.” The Gospel According to James will receive its World Premiere production at the Indiana Repertory Theater on March 25th, 2011. It will receive a subsequent production by The Tony Award-winning Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago in May of 2011.