Alice Childress's Wedding Band Extends TFANA Production

Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) has announced a one-week extension for its production of Alice Childress's Wedding Band, directed by Awoye Timpo. Performances will now run through May 22 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.

The TFANA production brings Childress's play back to New York for the first time since 1972 when it made its New York premiere in a production directed by Childress and Joseph Papp. Wedding Band is set in 1918, in Charleston, South Carolina, in a small, protective micro-community of Black women, in which a newcomer reveals a long-term relationship with a white man. The [lay subsequently traces the devoted couple's caustic confrontations with anti-miscegenation laws, vicious family racism, community disapproval, and finally deadly disease and their own long-buried feelings.

TheaterMania critic Pete Hempstead writes, "Why Wedding Band hasn't been revived in the city until now, we could speculate on for days. But we can also be grateful that it has finally been brought back, at Brooklyn's Polonsky Shakespeare Center, in a breathtakingly powerful production for Theatre for a New Audience."

The cast of Wedding Band features Brittany Bradford as Julia Augustine, Rosalyn Coleman as Lula Green, Veanne Cox as Herman's Mother, Rebecca Haden as Annabelle, Brittany-Laurelle as Mattie, Sofie Nesanelis as Princess, Phoenix Noelle as Teeta, Renrick Palmer as Nelson Green, Thomas Sadoski as Herman, Elizabeth Van Dyke as Fanny Johnson, and Max Woertendyke as Bell Man.