Iron Age Theatre&
The Montgomery County Cultural Center
Present
Iron Age Theatre
&
The Montgomery County Cultural Center
Present
 By Amiri Baraka aka Leroi Jones | Dutchman Featured on Theatre Journal Cover |
The production ran in August at the Centre Theatre at the Montgomery
County Cultural Center in August. The show was presented at the African
American Museum for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September.
The upcoming issue of Theatre Journal is a special edition entitled "Re-Thinking the Real" and will be focusing on the integration of art, imagination and theatre. According to Editor Harry Elam the production shots of Iron Age's "Dutchman" "are perfect for our theme." Theatre Journal has an international circulation.
The covers will feature the set of the production, Theodore Harris' vibrant collage backdrops and actors Garrett Lee Hendricks and Kate McLenigan.
The production was of the best attended shows of the Fringe Festival and was critically lauded. The Phildelphia Weekly wrote: "...Both Kate McLenigan and Garrett Lee Hendricks are impressive in their roles as the combatants. 'Dutchman' is effective as a wake-up call to those who are simply content to be forever pushed to and fro by the never-ending tide of subjugation." Main Line Ticket wrote: "...one of the landmark works of the early '60s avant garde, still feels contemporary after 38 years. It's an unsettling, emotionally violent play, made specific and personal by Hendricks and McLenigan's vivid performances."
It's a real honor to have this production chosen for the cover of a publication "as prestigious as Theatre Journal," said Director John Doyle. "Theatre professionals around the country read the magazine and this kind of exposure for Amiri Baraka's play and Iron Age's work in Philadelphia is great."
Images from the play are also being published in the journal Black Renaissance Noire in October. The images and collages by Theodore A Harris will acompany an article about the status of the black arts movement and Baraka.
The text of the Theatre Journal intro by Editor Harry Elam:
"The cover of this issue is also notable in this light. It comes from a 2002 production of Amiri Baraka's incendiary work Dutchman (1964), set against the backdrop of Theodore A. Harris's projected collages and staged by the Iron Age Theatre at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Through this image, the play as an important historic artifact, mounted in a museum that houses history, resonates with and reflects upon displaced racial, gendered and sexual "realities" from an earlier decade. At the same time, the juxtaposition of the actual contemporary performers with the evocative collage project of Harris that tells its own history promotes new articulations and interrogations of what constitutes the real. Part of what is so powerful about this image and why it was selected as the cover is that in viewing it we see not just the bodies on stage, but the projected images behind them as well. Each may be evocative on their own, but it is through their intertexuality, through reading the projected backdrop juxtaposed with the actors, through rubbing them against each other, that we understand a larger meaning. In this instance, then, the real is mediated through the visual intersections of bodies and projections. This image provocatively raises issues of how we situate the real now and how our concepts of the real is constantly shifting. And so with the questions provoked by this cover as a beginning, we invite you to engage critically with us in this project of re-thinking.
Harry Elan
Theatre Journal