Type/Caste – Queer Cultural Center

Type/Caste
June 10 & 11
AAACC, 7:30pm
Rotimi Agbabiaka/Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe
$15-$20 sliding scale
Friday, June 10
Brown Paper Ticket Link for June 10: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2546826
Saturday, June 11
Brown Paper Ticket Link for June 11: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2546834

A queer, black actor dreams of a dazzling career on the American stage but must contend with an industry largely unprepared for applicants who are not white heterosexuals. Using monologue, song, dance and drag Rotimi embodies, explores, and exposes the battles artists fight in the exclusive world of mainstream American theatre.

Drawing from Rotimi’s experience as a professional actor, Type/Caste portrays the peaks and pitfalls of a young artist’s quest for success and raises the questions: What is true artistic success and how can it be achieved in an art form that has been overrun by commercial concerns? How can an artist create outsider art in a profession that overwhelmingly favors insiders? How does our American brand of profits-over-people capitalism threaten the very soul of the performing arts?

ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Rotimi Agbabiaka is a San Francisco-based actor, writer, director and teaching artist. He most recently starred in Sojourners and runboyrun at the Magic Theatre, Hair at Bay Area Musicals, Holiday High Jinx with Word for Word, and Choir Boy at Marin Theatre Company. He has also performed with such companies as Cal Shakes, TheatreWorks, Alter Theater, Just Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, New Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Beach Blanket Babylon. He has done drag at Club Something and Hard French and has presented his writing at the Radar Reading Series and Queer Autonomous Zone. His solo play Homeless won the Best Solo Performance award at the SF Fringe Festival and was remounted by the Airspace Queer Artist Residency. He teaches youth theatre with Each One Reach One, SF Shakespeare, and the SF Mime Troupe Youth Theatre Project, writes articles for Theatre Bay Area magazine and is a collective member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He studied at Moscow Art Theatre and earned his MFA in Acting at Northern Illinois University. www.rotimionline.com

Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe is the creator of several solo pieces including Adventures of a Black Girl In Search of Academic Clarity and Inclusion, published by Indiana University press in 2014, and Traveling While Black. She is a nationally and internationally known director, and has worked at Trinity Repertory Company, Capital Repertory, Southern Rep in New Orleans, Mark Taper Forum, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Woolly Mammoth, Curious Theatre in Denver. Edris’ Bay Area directing credits include the West Coast premieres of Relativity at the Magic Theatre, Stealin’ Home at Exit Theatre; The Old Settler at TheaterWorks in Palo Alto; Crying Holy at Theatre Rhinoceros, and Urban Zulu Mambo and Blue/Orange at Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. Her productions of John Henry Redwood’s The Old Settler, received the Dean Goodman Award for Excellence (TheatreWorks) and, in Dallas. Best Production, two Best Acting Awards and an Outstanding Direction nomination from the 2003 Rabin awards. In 2006, she received her second Rabin nomination for her direction of Neil LaBute’s This Is How It Goes at Water Tower. She holds an M.F.A. in Directing from the University of Iowa and is an alumna of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors. Additional training has included theatre research and performance at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and at Shakespeare & Company in Tanglewood, Massachusetts.