A Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance co-production
@ BAAD! (841 Barretto St, 2nd FL, in the Bronx)

SAT JULY 17TH, 2010 @ 2:30PM & 7:30PM
ORIGINS OF US
Written and directed by Jerome A. Parker
*a barebones/installation performance

Promising cosmology graduate student, Adam, rents out his Bronx apartment's closet to a stranger. ORIGINS is a cautionary journey through the realms of time, space, the body and the mind.

Advance tickets at Brown Paper Tickets | Limited door tickets

The Artistic Team: Mamoudou Athie (Actor), Jamal Jordan (Production Assistant and Intern), Meagan Miller-McKeever (Production Designer), Andre Lancaster (Producing Artist), Thomas Lombardo (Actor), Corey Pierno (Fight Choreographer), and Aurin Squire (Dramaturg and Producing Artist).

The Citizen Theatre Playwright on his dangerous new play:

The play started as a gut response to the idea of Dark Energy, this untraceable phenomenon that is pushing the universe to expand at an exponential rate. The shape of Origins, especially its time jumps, takes its cue from this idea. Also, the one huge phenomenon in the play, when Adam, the main character, becomes pregnant, may seem fantastical at first, but its existence only underscores the fact that the unexplainable lives in our every day physical lives -- especially on a heightened cosmological plane.

The constant search for answers about his condition - how did he become impregnated, why is this happening to only HIV+ men, what is the next step in a journey that has no precedence - parallels his work as a young cosmologist, which tries to explain the beginnings, the present and the fate of the universe at large. Though I am not a cosmologist, I have always considered the condition of HIV+ people as having a baby they're stuck with and don't care to have. I'm sure this frame of mind has colored the play. But as a playwright I'm more interested in how lives are altered by moments/decisions/the people we let in and push away.”
- Jerome A, Parker

FIRE funders include The Union Square Arts Awards, a project of the Tides Foundation, Stonewall Community Foundation, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and the Brooklyn Arts Council, and S/HEROES FOR THE FUTURE.

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