Hear to New Engage in About Painter Archibald Motley From Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Icons Series

The radio-drama series, all commissioned from playwrights of shade, highlights figures from the Harlem Renaissance.

To celebrate Black Heritage Thirty day period, The Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH), Broadway Podcast Community, and Playbill are partnering to release ICONS: Harlem Renaissance in Motion, a collection of 50 %-hour radio dramas composed by playwrights of coloration, each and every focusing on a figure from the Harlem Renaissance. The podcasts are created by CTH and Venus Radio Theater.

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of time of great creative and cultural prosper for Black artists in the New York Metropolis neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s. From writers, painters, and musicians to activists and philosophers, very well-regarded pioneers from the Harlem Renaissance contain Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Van Der Zee, Duke Ellington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey. For the assortment of plays, CTH commissioned Harlem-based playwrights to develop monologues executed by Harlem-primarily based actors, honoring the mostly unsung voices of intriguing figures, specifically gals, who had been integral to the motion.

Curated by CTH’s Director of Literary Courses & Dramaturg Shawn René Graham and Mellon Basis Playwright-in-Residence Betty Shamieh, the sequence was originally established in 2021 for Women’s History Thirty day period, and highlighted actress Nina Mae McKinney, blues singer Gladys Bentley, writers May well Miller and Angelina Weld Grimké, and the fictional Mattie Mae, an amalgam of Black gals who fled the south during the Fantastic Migration for new economic and cultural futures. All those episodes will be launched all over the month on BPN, or click by means of the backlinks to pay attention on Playbill.