Play Club: We Are Proud to Present…
About Play Club
A book club – but plays! Join Long Wharf Theatre’s Artistic Associates Cheyenne Barboza & Kate Moore Heaney, along with guest artists, as we discuss a featured play each month. Play Club scripts dive into Long Wharf Theatre’s archive as well as provide a glimpse into its future. Come join this virtual discussion with fellow theatre lovers from the comfort of your own home!
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About the Play
We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 – 1915
A group of actors gather to tell the little-known story of the first genocide of the 20th century. We Are Proud to Present … takes place largely in a rehearsal room that descends from collaborative to absurd as a group of idealistic actors—three black and three white—attempt to recreate the extinction of the Herero tribe at the hands of their German colonizers. Along the way, they test the limits of empathy as their own stories, subjectivities, assumptions and prejudices catalyze their theatrical process. Eventually the full force of a horrific past crashes into the good intentions of the present, and what seemed a faraway place and time comes all too close to home.
“The historical truths of the play collide with theatre-making in a viscerally charged way. This play held me and kept me every step of the way.”
Cheyenne Barboza, Artistic Associate, Community
About the Playwright
Jackie Sibblies Drury
she/herJackie Sibblies Drury (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Her play We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 had its world premiere at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and its New York premiere at Soho Rep in the fall of 2012. Drury’s work has been featured at PRELUDE.11, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Victory Gardens’ 2010 Ignition Festival, American Theater Company’s 10 x 10 Festival and the Magic Theatre’s Virgin Play Series. Drury received a 2012-13 Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship at New Dramatists. She was a member of the 2011-12 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, a 2010-12 New York Theatre Workshop Emerging Artist of Color Fellow and a member of The Civilians’ R&D Group. She was the dramaturg and contributing writer for Zero Cost House, a collaboration between Pig Iron Theatre Company and Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada. Drury is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect and a MacDowell Colony Fellow. She is a graduate of Brown University’s M.F.A. playwriting program, where she received the David Wickham Prize in Playwriting. Her play Social Creatures was commissioned by Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., and premiered there in March 2013. Drury is the inaugural recipient of the 2012-14 Jerome New York Fellowship at the Lark Play Development Center.
