ATLANTA (AP) - The Atlanta theater community is joining theaters around the nation in producing not one, but 75 short plays inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.
The project’s title - “Every 28 Hours” - comes from the widely shared and contested statistic that a black person is killed by police every 28 hours, WABE Radio reported (https://bit.ly/2egUKDy).
The show originated as a partnership between the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the One-Minute Play Festival in 2014 following the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown.
The production has since been taken on by theater companies across the United States, the Atlanta radio station reported.
In Atlanta, “Every 28 Hours” will be on stage at the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College at 7 p.m. Monday.
Actors Express artistic director Freddie Ashley explains that the Atlanta theater company came to the project through their relationship with the One Minute Play Festival, which Actors Express has been associated with for about five years.
When the idea arose to take on this production, Ashley says that it didn’t make sense to go it alone.
“I thought we really needed to partner with artists and organizations around the city to make sure that it really was a community-driven event,” he said.
“Every 28 Hours” is being produced in collaboration with the Atlanta University Consortium and the Alliance Theatre.
“We’re doing theater, but this theater is just a catalyst for protest,” Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, one of many directors working on putting the 75 one-minute-long plays onstage, told WABE.
Though the project is focused on the struggles and lives of people of color, she said that all of Atlanta is welcome.
“We cannot have real, true change,” Moss-Bouldin said, “unless everyone takes part.”
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Information from: WABE-FM, https://www.wabe.org/
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