JACK

Two men batter but don't draw blood. Two women weep but their faces stay dry. What happens when emotions are enacted not experienced? What makes the fake?

James and Jess are in a relationship. They both cry. She hits things more than he does, but he used to be a well-honed instrument of death. Jess found violence and rage in ballet, keening, orgone therapy. James searched for compassion in martial arts, street fighting, Mongolian wrestling. Apart, they asked four performers what it means to fight as men, to cry as women. Together, they’ve built a two-ring circus of gendered pain welling up with Sweat & Tears, two alchemies of salt and water, two body responses to the difficult work of feeling.

About the Company: M-34

M-34 is a fake mustache, a white phosphorous grenade, a star cluster and a crosstown bus. It is a rotating ensemble of young people attempting to be rigorous, critical and curious in a creative wasteland. We are lying in the gutter but looking at the stars. www.m-34.org 

Dick's Last Stand is a 40-minute reenactment by artist Donelle Woolford of the stand-up routine that Richard Pryor performed in 1977 for the last episode of his short-lived television show. The routine is a subversive work of deconstruction and social commentary that, by Pryor's design, was censored from the final NBC broadcast. Consequently, Pryor's stand-up has only ever been experienced by the 75-plus persons who were in the live studio audience that night.

Donelle Woolford's cathartic new body of work chronicles the place of honor afforded the male sex organ in American art and politics, and continues the oral tradition of phallic humor and innuendo in popular culture. Dick's Last Stand honors Pryor's brash political humor and marks its return to the live stage, where its allegories on race, conformity, representation, and subterfuge are as painfully hilarious as ever. Throughout the original performance, Pryor continually dissembled himself, playing with the notion that Richard Pryor, comedian, was someone who could not be pinned down or controlled. He slid from one character or attitude to the next without ever indicating when -- if ever -- the audience was seeing the "real" Richard Pryor.

This chimerical quality -- this defiance -- is what attracted Woolford to the performance in the first place, but her reenactment pushes the mise en abyme even further. Instead of Richard Pryor playing Richard Pryor playing Mudbone, Dick's Last Stand is Woolford playing Richard Pryor playing Richard Pryor playing Mudbone -- across generations and in drag!

The performance is realized in cooperation with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as part of the 2014 Biennial. This edition of the Biennial -- the country's best-known survey of the latest developments in American art -- will take place March 7May 25, 2014.

(It will be the last Biennial in the Museum's building at 945 Madison Avenue before the Museum moves downtown to its new building in the spring of 2015. This is the 77th in the Museum's ongoing series of Annuals and Biennials begun in 1932 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.)

Dick's Last Stand tour dates:

LA Art Book Fair, Los Angeles 1/31/14
La><art, Los Angeles 2/2/14
Wattis Institute, San Francisco 2/6/14
Solespace, Oakland 2/8/14
MOCAD, Detroit 2/14/14
Dorchester Projects, Chicago 2/18/14
JACK, Brooklyn 3/7/14
The Kitchen, New York 4/1/14
Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis 5/20/14
Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha 5/21/14
White Flag Projects, St. Louis 2/22/14
Contemporary Art Center, Peoria 5/24/14

Dick's Last Stand is accompanied by Dick Jokes, an extraordinary volume of phallic humor compiled from throughout the United States over the past 50 years. It is available at all tour venues and at thingsthatfall.com.

About Donelle Woolford
Donelle Woolford (b. 1980 in Detroit) lives and works in Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Philadelphia, London, and Vienna. She has participated in the exhibitions Double Agent at the ICA London; The 8th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates; and Buy American at Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris. Her performances have been staged at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton; The Suburban, Chicago; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. She is represented by Wallspace, New York, and Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna.

Arts.Performance

For this provocative, rarely produced 1924 Eugene O'Neill play about interracial marriage, Civic Ensemble Artistic Director Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. (Dispatches from (A)mended America) divides the audience by race black on one side, white on the other, and others forced to choose a side. In the play, Jim, a black man, loves Ella, a white woman. She loves him back. They struggle to come together from grade school through high school graduation and into marriage. But the marriage begins to buckle under the weight of Jim's aspirations and Ella's fears, setting the stage for a rabid climax. O'Neill paints a bitter picture about the external pressures on interracial marriage, but the biggest pressures come from within Jim and Ella themselves. Civic Ensemble co-produces with Above The Fold, co-creators of the documentary play Dispatches From (A)mended America.

Directed by Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.
Lighting Design by Christina Watanabe

Featuring:
Brandt Adams*
Devin Haqq*
Kevaughn Harvey*
Vernice Miller*
Lori Parquet*
Jamie Watkins
Barbra Wengerd*
*Member, Actors Equity Association
AEA Approved Showcase

Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. recently co-wrote and starred in the documentary play Dispatches from (A)mended America, which was produced by OBIE-winning Epic Theatre Ensemble in the fall of 2012. Dispatches... examines the hopes, fears and dreams of the American South during the month leading up to President Barack Obama's inauguration. has been championing and shepherding new scripts and adaptations toward production for over 15 years. He was most recently seen in Epic's take on Richard III entitled Born with Teeth. In summer of 2012, Godfrey appeared as Macduff in Epic's re-imagining of Macbeth in NYC, and in February 2013 he appeared as Hambone in Syracuse Stage's production of Two Trains Running. Godfrey also recently co-wrote and appeared in The Lost Children, Mark Harris' independent film about death cults. Godfrey appeared in Alec Duffy's acclaimed site-specific production of Murder in the Cathedral at The Church of St. Joseph in Brooklyn.

Civic Ensemble creates theatre that explores and explodes the social, political, and cultural issues of our time. Through the production of new and overlooked plays, community-based plays, and re-imaginings of classics, Civic Ensemble works to bring audiences of different races, classes, and experiences together in a public forum on the American experiment.

Above The Fold is Brandt Adams and Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., two actor/writer/teaching artists who make investigative theatre about Race in America.

Arts.Performance