Aural Sex at the Kennedy Center this Saturday, August 31st

Please click image to enlarge.

African-American Collective Theater (ACT) is blessed to have some of the most supportive, loyal, patient, encouraging, generous, enthusiastic and understanding friends imaginable. 

Over the decades (!) you’ve faithfully followed us from makeshift performance spaces to church basements, to less than ideal, underfunded black box theaters. You’ve put up with box office lines, heat, humidity, “Sold Out” signs, leaky roofs, noise, failing lights, thunderstorms, inadequate sound systems, obscure locations, impossible parking, rickety stairs, dust, overflowing dumpsters, hard folding chairs…and even the occasional mouse.

As a way of expressing our gratitude, I wanted to make especially sure that you guys, our ACT family, all knew about the performance we have coming up this Saturday evening, August 31, 2013 at 7:30 p.m. 

For the third time, we will be returning to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ “Page-to-Stage Festival” this year, with our final performance of “Aural Sex” -- a program featuring readings of six of my short plays, ranging between ten and thirty minutes each. 

Please click image to enlarge.

Many of the folks onstage will be familiar to you, along with some new, young, faces making their first ACT appearances. The cast includes: Donald Burch III, Brian Hamlett, Rashard Harrison, Tristan Phillip Hewitt, Stanley Andrew Jackson, Cleavon Meabon IV, Darnell Morris, Juan Raheem, Reginald Richard, David A. Richardson, Michael Sainte-Andress and, of course, Monte J. Wolfe. In addition, Gregory Ford has graciously agreed to provide the narration. 

At last year’s festival appearance, so many of you turned out, that we quickly exceeded the capacity of the relatively small space into which we’d been scheduled. We had to scramble and present two performances of each play, with the incredible overflow audience seated in the huge third floor Grand Foyer, which was definitely less than ideal.

In light of your overwhelming support, as well as a standing-room-only audience earlier this summer, when we presented a version of “Aural Sex” at the DC Black Theater festival – this time Kennedy Center has booked us into the Terrace Theater – a beautiful space with almost 500 seats. 

So, we invite you to join us this coming Saturday evening and spend part of your Labor Day weekend with the rest of our ACT family members at the Kennedy Center, where -- for a change -- you can enjoy comfortable seats, plenty of bathrooms, lots of space, no lines, functioning AC, easy access, including the free shuttle bus from the Georgetown/Foggy Bottom station on METRO’s blue and orange lines, as well as --NOT inexpensive -- garage parking. (Arrive extra early to score any available on-street parking.) 

But “Aural Sex” is still a cheap date, because best of all: 

Admission is completely FREE. No tickets or advance reservations necessary. And, obviously, plenty of seats -- so feel free to bring as many folks as you like. The Kennedy Center is giving us this prestigious spot, so we definitely want to justify their vote of confidence. As usual, suggested for mature audiences, of course. (This is ACT, after all.)

We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible Saturday evening and PLEASE -- share this and the attached info to help us spread the word!

Alan Sharpe

 

As always, thanks for having our back!
Alan Sharpe