Local theater company brings new production to Kent Station

Published 4:37 pm Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Theatre Battery, a local production company, is bringing live theater to Kent Station for the fourth year, and the performances are free this season.

“Hooded or Being Black for Dummies” opens Saturday and runs through Saturday, Sept. 10, with previews Thursday and Friday of this week. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, with a 2 o’clock matinee on Sunday, Sept. 4.

Theatre Battery, started by Kent-Meridian High School graduate Logan Ellis and several friends and classmates in 2011 with hopes of bringing live theater to Kent, received a grant from The Biller Family Foundation to present the production at no charge to theater-goers, a concept coined radical hospitality.

Last year, Theatre Battery presented several performances of “A Maze” for free.

“The response was so great the weekend of performances we did with ‘A Maze’ with radical hospitality was totally packed in here and that was really exciting to see, and even more so the type of audience we are trying to reach, which is local and young and diverse in all ways,” Ellis said. “That was really something we wanted to continue emulating and being able to provide.”

For each showing of “Hooded”, 30 tickets can be reserved at Theatrebattery.strangertickets.com, and another 20 will be available at the door starting an hour before showtime.

Theatre Battery has converted a storefront at 438 Ramsay Way, Suite 103, nest to Christopher & Banks, into a temporary theater space. Kent Station provides the space at no cost to the nonprofit production company.

“That level of support is really unprecedented,” Ellis said. “That is something that helps us keep dong work in Kent as opposed to working in an urban setting where there is more of a theater community that has already been established.”

Playwright hopes “Hooded” sparks conversations, change

Ellis, who lives and works in San Francisco most of the year, first read “Hooded” last year while working for the Playwrights Foundation

“I thought that it would be a really incredible pairing between that play and Theatre Battery based upon the content of our audience and also what our performing ensemble is interested in,” he said. “Looking at it earlier this year when we were in our season selection time we had our company members read the play and had just a tremendous response to it. It became really clear that a play that is this urgent and this theatrical and this unifying was just what we had to do this year.”

“Hooded” was written by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm, an up and coming playwright from St. Louis, Mo., who recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and will attend the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at The Julliard School in New York City this fall.

The Kent production will be the second workshop production for “Hooded” as Chisholm prepares for its premiere at the Mosaic Theatre in Washington, D.C., next spring.

“I am working on the draft each time and seeing what works and what doesn’t and building up to this sort of big to do in D.C.,” Chisholm said.

Chisholm started writing “Hooded” about two years ago as a part of class for his master’s program.

“It came out of this existential break down I was having caused by grad school,” he said. “I didn’t know what I writing, why I was writing it or why I was alive, what was my purpose and all this big stuff. This was the play that came out of that.”

“Hooded” was inspired by Frank Wedekind’s “Spring Awakening,” Chisholm said.

“He was pushing a lot of the edges of what was acceptable in theater and that appealed to me,” Chisholm said. “I started to think about what that would look like today and it occurred to me that while the awakening in ‘Spring Awakening” is sexual here the awakening would be sort of racial, figuring out who you are and what that means and your place and how you fit in the bigger sort to of society.”

“Hooded” tells the story of Marquis and Tru, 14-year-old black boys who exist in two totally different worlds. Marquis is a republican prep-schooler living in the affluent white suburb of Achievement Heights, while Tru is a street savvy rap artist from deep within inner-city Baltimore. Their paths cross one day in a holding cell, where Tru decides that Marquis has lost his “blackness.” As professor and reluctant student, they confront ignorance and traverse the gap between 2pac and Nietzsche.

“I like to think their struggle is sort of universal and that people can see everyone has to deal with this idea of who they think they are versus what the world sees them as and coming to terms with that in a greater sort of capacity,” Chisholm said

The racial themes of the play are timely, Chisholm said.

“I am finding it to be very needed when people see it,” he said. “That is one of the biggest compliments I have gotten is that this play is needed. I hope that it will start the right kinds of conversations and maybe changes some minds.”

Chisholm said he looks forward to presenting his work in Kent.

“The audience is like an unseen character in the play. It is important to get into to a bunch of different types of audiences, as many as possible for me, so Kent seemed like a really good sort of testing ground for the play. I am really excited to be here and sort of work with these guys to build the play up.”

Battery Powered Series returns

Theatre Battery will also host its Battery Powered Series, a platform for workshops of new plays from Puget Sound writers.

In its third year, the series provides developmental workshops and staged readings for playwrights looking to refine their new work. Readings are directed and acted by local artists, occurring on the main stage performance space on the off nights of Hooded, with free admission for the public.

This year’s pieces are “Don’t Call it a Riot!” by Amontaine Aurore, 2 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 28; “Enter Starlighter” by Jessica Andrewartha, 5 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 4, and 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 14; and “A Quality Eduction” by Seayoung Yim, 2 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 11.

For more information, visit theatrebattery.org.

BELOW: The cast of Theatre Battery’s production of “Hooded or Being Black for Dummies” prepares for the show opening this weekend at Kent Station. Courtesy Photo, Click & Tell Photography