WEDDING BAND THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE | Alice Childress (playwright); Awoye Timpo (director); Jason Ardizzone-West (set design); Queen Jean (costume design); Stacey Derosier (lighting designer); Rena Anakwe (sound designer); Nikiya Mathis (hair & wig designer); Alphonso Horne (composer); Renee Robinson (movement director); Jonno Knust (properties supervisor); Arminda Thomas (dramaturg); Maggie Mansano (stage manager); Kat Meister (assistant stage manager); Veanne Cox, Brittany Laurelle, Elizabeth Van Dyke, Renrick Palmer, Rebecca Haden, Sofie Nesanelis, Phoenix Noelle Reece, Max Woertendyke, Rosalyn Coleman, Brittany Bradford, Thomas Sadoski (actors); Teresa L Williams (associate set designer); Lukas White, Gaya Chatterjee, C De la Cruz, Ethan Brown (assistant set designers).

PRESS

VULTURE REVIEW
”In the elegant production at Theater for a New Audience, the director Awoye Timpo deliberately blurs the edges of the play. Alphonso Horne’s hypnotic jazz compositions melt the borders of each scene away from the real. The theater has been arranged into alley seating, with long rows of seats on either side of a median covered in dirt and fringed with tall seagrass. At one end of this central strip, Julia’s furniture and suitcases huddle against the grass’s soft fringe. It’s an abstract idea of Franny’s property: When people enter and leave Julia’s small rented house, there’s no door, no porch, no lighting shift. Even the interior’s placement doesn’t stay consistent. Sometimes when people are standing in the middle of the playing area they’re in the house, sometimes they’re not.

Clearly Timpo, set designer Jason Ardizzone-West, and lighting designer Stacey Derosier have thought about the South Carolina Lowcountry marshland. It’s a tidal place (the set provides this too), both salt and fresh. At the end of this production of Wedding Band, a white-clad Julia splashes calf-deep in water that has seeped up through the soil — you’ll be reminded of movies like Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, in which Gullah women dance against the same kind of estuarial backdrop. In the salt marsh, the liquid world always finds a way in, no matter what you do to keep it out. So it’s a thought-provoking (and extremely beautiful) setting for Childress’s ideas about other seeping things — a mysterious, fog-in-the-light sort of place.”
-Vulture 2022 (Helen Shaw)
click here to link for full article

NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW (NYT CRITIC’S PICK)
“The first think you see upon taking your seat at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn is a worn-out double bed. That’s only fitting for “Wedding Band”, a 1962 play by Alice Childress about ancient conflict and intimate relations. How much human wrangling has transpired in or over that one piece of furniture? Whether wrought iron, four-poster, straw or “enseamed”, the bed is where we enact the drama of who may love and how”
-The New York Times 2022 (Jesse Green)
click here to link for full article

NEW YORK TIMES BEST THEATER OF 2022
“The restoration of Childress (1912-94) to her rightful place as a major American playwright took another step forward when Theater for a New Audience presented, for the first time in a major New York production since its 1972 debut, this blazing, upsetting, necessary work for today. Like her “Trouble in Mind,” “Wedding Band” dramatizes racism not as an anomaly but as a chronic condition - in this case exemplified by the troubled relationship between a Black woman and a white man who in the South Carolina of 1918 cannot marry. But Awoye Timpo’s impassioned production was also about the miscegenation of America itself, a marriage still far from happy for than 100 years later”
-The New York Times 2022 (Jesse Green, Maya Phillips, Laura Collins-Hughes, Scott Heller, Alexis Soloski, and Elisabeth Vincentelli)
click here to link for full article

TIME OUT NY REVIEW
”We first meet Julia - brought to life in a radiant and ultimately heartbreaking performance by Brittany Bradford - as she’s trying to settle into a new home, having been driven from others by intolerant neighbors. Her accommodations are modest, but Jason Ardizzone-West’s alluring scenic design emphasizes the warmth and openness represented by the natural world… Childress surveys the bitter legacy of bigotry - racial, nationalist, classist - in dialogue that can be as brutal as it is eloquent and humane. Tensions come to a head in a final confrontation between Julia and Herman that is as powerful and as real as anything you’ll see on stage this season. The same could be said for this production as a whole, which helps restore Childress’s enduring work to the attention it deserves.”
-Time Out New York (Elysa Gardner)
click here to link for full article

THE WRAP REVIEW
”Timpo directs a Cinemascope production for this simultaneously intimate and sprawling story. Jason Ardizzone-West’s set uses every inch of the theater and even a few we didn’t know about until he and Timpo reveal them to us in a thrilling conclusion.”
-The Wrap (Robert Hofler)
click here to link for full article

AUDELCO NOMINATIONS
”Theatre for a New Audience’s production of the late Alice Childress’ play “Wedding Band” tied with seven nominations. It is up for best revival of a play; director of a play—Awoye Timpo; lead actress—Brittany Bradford; featured actress—Elizabeth Van Dyke; set design—Jason Ardizzone-West; costume design—Qween Jean; and lighting design—Stacey Derosier.”
-Amsterdam News (Linda Armstrong)
click here to link for full article