Innovative works of live performance for multicultural audiences.

Shaping Ideas into theatrical events.

European/American actress Louise Smith and African-American writer/director Carlyle Brown were friends and mutual admirers for many years when they finally decided to work together.  Talking Masks is the result of their collaboration, an evening of six short plays that have a broad range of styles, moods, themes and characters that are about women and the masks they wear to conceal their true identities.  Talking Masks is a response to how women are forced to interact with man’s idea and ideal of womanhood.  How the roles of mother, daughter, lover, wife, and the beautiful can trap a woman in her body while they fulfill her mission in the cycle of life.  These six short plays are all about women who have either fallen from or have rejected a man’s image of woman.

The Plays

The Human Voice: A woman says good-bye to her lover for the last time over the telephone.

Runaway Honeymoon: Based on the true slave narrative of William and Ellen Craft, this play recounts the escape of a husband and wife from slavery.  Their escape is facilitated by the fact that the wife is so light-skinned that she can pose as a white southern gentleman traveling with “his” slave on their way north.

White Girl From the Projects: The story of a White girl who grows up Black in an urban environment and her struggle for personal identity.

The Diva Makes Her Entrance: An experienced Burlesque Diva instructs a stage frightened Ingénue moments before their entrance on stage.

Mother Love: In a police station interrogation room a mother is interrogated over the murder of her son.

The Talking Mask: A poetic drama of a woman literally trapped behind a mask and her attempts to change its surface and eventually remove it entirely.

Artist Team

Artistic Director's Notes

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopedia, an ideal, or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as, is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

                                                                        D.H. Lawrence, Give Her a Pattern

 I was raised by three women my mother and my grandmother and my aunt, and if these stories came from anywhere they came from them.  They were three Black women who had liberated themselves and were fortified against the inconstancy and abuse of men.  Yet they endeavored to raise me with all the kindness, generosity and love that a young male child could receive from three women who had experienced the vicariousness of man.  And so it is my hope, as a writer and a son, that these short plays will have something to say to every woman.

 -Carlyle Brown

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Last modified: 10/23/07