Fisher Center LAB/Civis Hope Commission
A work-in-progress reading of a libretto by Suzan-Lori Parks
Inspired by Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha
Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III
Photos: Scott Joplin c/o Encyclopædia Britannica; Suzan-Lori Parks by Tammy Shell
July 11–13
“Now that we free
Who we gonna be?”
Join us in the LAB for a special first glimpse of a musical in the making, the first of Fisher Center LAB’s Civis Hope Commissions.
Replete with dancing bears and bags of luck, and set on the day after the Emancipation Proclamation, Jubilee joyfully asks what the world might become when all people are truly free. Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog) has drawn inspiration from Scott Joplin’s 1910 ragtime opera Treemonisha to create a magical, hilarious, and timely fable about a young woman who leads her community out of adversity and into a new way of being.
This staged reading of Suzan-Lori’s libretto for Jubilee, commissioned by Fisher Center LAB, offers audiences a rare opportunity to engage directly with the development of a major new musical, which the Fisher Center will premiere as a full production in the near future.
The Sunday, July 13 performance of Jubilee—as well as the postshow talk—will be ASL-interpreted.
For more information, please contact the Box Office by phone at 845-758-7900 or via email at [email protected].
Suzan-Lori Parks is a multi-award-winning American writer and musician. She is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Topdog/Underdog, which recently enjoyed its twentieth-anniversary Broadway revival and won the 2023 Tony Award. Other notable plays include Sally & Tom (2024), Plays for the Plague Year (Drama Desk Best Music, 2023), and Father Comes Home From the Wars (2014). Parks’ first marathon writing “diary play” 365 Days/365 Plays—in which she wrote a play a day for an entire year—was produced at more than seven hundred theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, her novel Getting Mother’s Body is published by Random House. She also writes extensively for the screen—most recently, as the showrunner/executive producer/head writer for the television show Genius: Aretha. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and of Mount Holyoke College, where she studied creative writing with James Baldwin, who encouraged Parks to begin writing for the theatre. In her spare time, Parks also writes songs and fronts her band SLP & The Joyful Noise.
Steve H. Broadnax III (Director) Thoughts of a Colored Man (Broadway), Suzan-Lori Parks; Sally and Tom at the Guthrie Theatre and The Public in New York (World Première); Katori Hall’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize Première The Hot Wing King at The Signature Theatre; Lee Edward Colston’s The First Deep Breath at Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and Chicago’s Victory Garden Theatre (Premiere and Winner of Jeff Awards Best New Work); Dominique Morisseau’s Sunset Baby at The Signature Theatre (NYC); Blood at the Root at the National Black Theatre (Winner of Kennedy Center’s Hip Hop Theater Creator Award); and William Jackson Harper’s Premiere Travisville at NYC Ensemble Studio. He is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre and serves as the Artistic Director at Arkansas Rep as well as a Professor of Theatre at Penn State University, where he is Co-Head of MFA Directing.
Major development support for Jubilee has been received from the Fisher Center’s Hope Commissions Fund, generously endowed by the Civis Foundation and Bard College. Additional developmental support was received in part from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, and The Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Foundation.
Fisher Center LAB is supported by the Lucille Lortel Foundation and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and additional funding from The William and Lia G. Poorvu Family Foundation.
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Eat & StayBard College’s main campus is located in Annandale-on-Hudson (a hamlet of Red Hook), New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 90 miles north of New York City and 220 miles southwest of Boston. The Taconic State Parkway and the New York State Thruway provide the most direct routes to our campus. Click the Google map below, or get directions by entering the following address into your GPS: 60 Manor Avenue, Red Hook, NY 12571.
From the East
If you are traveling from east of the Hudson River in New York State, take the Taconic State Parkway to the Red Hook / Route 199 exit, drive west on Route 199 through the village of Red Hook to Route 9G, turn right onto Route 9G, drive north 1.9 miles, turn left onto Annandale Road, then turn right onto Manor Ave.
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If you are traveling from west of the Hudson River, take the New York State Thruway (I-87) to exit 19 (Kingston), take Route 209 (changes to Route 199 at the Hudson River) over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge to Route 9G, turn left onto Route 9G, drive north 3.5 miles, turn left onto Annandale Road, then turn right onto Manor Ave.
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