Poets & Writers Theater

“This poem is not a cry for help. This poem is not my broken pieces. And we are not done yet.” In this HBO documentary, a group of veterans and active-duty service members come together to write a collaborative poem and turn it into a stage performance. The film is directed by Sareen Hairabedian and coproduced by Jeffrey Wright and David Holbrooke.

In this video, Claudia Rankine talks about how touring for her award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014) organically led to the development of her new play, The White Card. The play unfolds as an influential white couple invites an up-and-coming black artist over to their posh New York City loft for a dinner party. The world premiere is directed by Diane Paulus and produced by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In this video, Peg Alford Pursell introduces the stories from her debut collection, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow (ELJ Editions, 2017), for the Stories on Stage Davis series, which combines literature and theater. Pursell is featured in “5 Over 50” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.” In this scene from This Is Macbeth, Joan Malkin, Carrie Paff, and Atosa Babaoff deliver their rendition of the three witches in Act One, Scene One of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography (Mariner Books, 1973), adapted by Darryl Pinckney, was transformed into a music theater performance by director Cathie Boyd's Scottish production company Cryptic. Pinckney is the author of Black Deutschland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), a new novel exploring sexuality and identity.