Citizen: An American Lyric presented by The Fountain Theatre and Grand Performances
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Friday, January 20, 2023
08:00 pm - 10:30 pm
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Saturday, January 21, 2023
02:00 pm - 04:30 pm
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Saturday, January 21, 2023
08:00 pm - 10:30 pm
In a preview Jan. 20 at 8 p.m. and two shows Jan. 21 (2 and 8 p.m.), this provocative meditation on race fuses, prose, poetry, movement, music, and the visual image. A lyric poem, snapshots, vignettes, on the acts of everyday racism. Remarks, glances, implied judgments. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV — everywhere, all the time. Those did-that-really-just-happen-did-they-really-just say-that slurs that happen every day and enrage in the moment and later steep poisonously in the mind. And, of course, those larger incidents that become national or international firestorms. As Rankine writes, “This is how you are a citizen.”
CITIZEN premiered at The Fountain Theatre on August 1st, 2015 and ran through October 11. Since then it has been produced at Kirk Douglas Theatre as part of the inaugural Block Party season in 2017, and at Grand Park’s Our L.A. Voices: Spring Arts Festival in 2018.