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Drama. By Tom Conklin. Based on interviews by Tom Conklin and Sibylla Nash. Cast: 2m., 4w. How well do you know your neighbors? subURBAN Stories, a piece of documentary theater, uncovers the secret histories of six neighbors—three black, three white—who live side by side in an idyllic, integrated suburb. The voices heard in this play all come from people who escaped to suburban homes, each bringing with him or her personal histories of anger, pride, violence and hope.
Keith, a buttoned-down black professional and amateur cyclist, survived two near-death experiences at the hands of racists.
His wife, Nancy, is a white free-spirited child of the '60s whose first marriage was to an abusive motorcycle gang member.
Victoria is a black woman who has achieved success as a marketing executive despite being raised in a St. Louis ghetto and enduring forced busing and who flirted with a radical Back-to-Africa movement in the '70s.
Her teenage daughter, Latonya, struggles to find her own identity in a middle-class school where kids glamorize the "thug" lifestyle.
Patsy is a 70-year-old white woman who romanticizes the good old days in Newark, before the city was burned in the race riots of the '60s.
Steve, a white artist raised in Manhattan's housing projects, has exiled himself to the suburbs after being alienated from the mainstream New York art scene. He takes his belief in the superiority of "primitive" cultures to a bizarre and surprising extreme.
The intensely personal stories in subURBAN Stories—based on interviews with real individuals and all told in their own words—will surprise and shock audiences and leave them wondering what secrets their own neighbors might have buried in the past. May be performed as readers theatre. Minimal set. Approximate running time: 80 minutes.
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