I’m happy to share I’ll be playing famous anti-slavery radical John Brown in the upcoming staged reading of “Baldwin / Kennedy” at the Castillo Theatre on Theatre Row next Friday, June 16th at 7 pm. The script, penned by Jared Glenn and Jacqueline Salit, is fantastic. Proceeds will go to support the great work of the All Stars Project, Inc.
Play synopsis: “In the Spring of 1963, the struggle for racial equality and social justice is spreading with passion and fury. Two Americans – the writer James Baldwin and the attorney general Robert Kennedy – personified the wrenching collision between liberalism and radicalism, between America as it was and America as it must become. These two famous men found themselves tied together in the historical upheavals of the 1960’s, sometimes against their will. The ghosts of abolitionist leaders Frederick Douglass and John Brown show up to offer them guidance and perspective, as does the playwright Lorraine Hansberry and Kennedy’s housekeeper Mabel Dixon. Jimmy and Bobby are nonetheless caught up in the realities of their time and in their deep need for love and legitimacy from the world and from each other. BALDWIN/KENNEDY imagines that story.”