“Hear Our Cry” is mostly monologues artfully assembled to represent a diverse mix of voices: gay, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, immigrant, female. It is made up of historic texts and also new works inspired by historic texts and current cultural challenges. As director Chad says, "Hear Our Cry passes the mic to voices that have shaped our history, but may be absent from our history books.” Kathleen Egan helped Chad with the adaptation.
This is an hour and a half of well performed, varied, engaging mostly monologues. The opening Harvey Milk speech by our own City Clerk, Chris Swope felt particularly relevant and close to home. Most of the actors were not familiar to me, and the virtual format allows far-flung actors to participate — a great group! I did love seeing the favorite former Lansing-ites, the excellent Shariesse Hamilton, Zurich Dawson and Greg Hunter.
My favorite bit was the “non-monologue” a full cast mini-play, “Out of Body” by Shawntai Brown featuring Greg and his teacher colleagues in a Zoom meeting setting, with some interesting secrets/assumptions/prejudices revealed — a gem of a script, and well done.
This is an excellent theatre experience — continuing for two more nights at 7 pm in the parking lot on the corner of south Capital and Washtenaw. Kudos to Ben Cassidy who, I think, was responsible for the editing and other tech stuff? The sound was fine on the radio “station” 101.2, I think — but it is also captioned for extra clarity.
This is a show that is ironically both “new” and “historic”— and safe in the Covid-free confines of your own car. Well worth the drive.
It is free of charge, but the parking lot only holds 40 vehicles. There were maybe 15-ish tonight? Hard to get a count from inside the car, but this SHOULD fill up on Friday and Saturday. Email the office mailto:office@peppermintcreek.org to make a reservation and get a confirmation that there is room for you.
Here is the complete info on how make arrangements to reserve a parking space:
http://www.peppermintcreek.org/hear-our-cry-directions--parking.html
Here is more info with all the names and titles and links to the texts.
http://www.peppermintcreek.org/hear-our-cry-info.html