OPEN CALL: ASIA STEWART

When

July 26, 2024    
7:30 pm

Where

The Griffin Theatre @ The Shed
545 West 30th Street, New York
Free with ticket reservation

Reservations will be available to the general public on Thursday, June 27. For sold out performances, an in-person wait list will be available 15 minutes before the show begins. Reserve tickets HERE.

Admission to Open Call events is free with a ticket reservation. Members receive early access to reservations beginning Tuesday, June 25. Become a member today.

Learn more about accessibility for this production.

Asia Stewart’s Fabric Softener is a theatrical response to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, offering an imagined ritual with the power to revive young Black women and insist on their survival. Stewart draws on three characters from the many who populate Morrison’s 1977 novel: Pilate, her daughter Reba, and granddaughter Hagar. In the original text, Hagar dies of a broken heart after deeming herself unworthy of love, beauty, and acceptance.

In her performance, punctuated by musical outbursts of spirituals and passages from the novel, Stewart presents three new characters who are not recreations of these women but are instead archetypes: The Laundress, The Celebrant, and The Witness. The performance begins as The Celebrant and The Witness prepare The Laundress for an intervention: a baptism, a becoming, and a funeral for what used to be and can no longer exist.