"Powerful"
- The British Theatre Guide
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their stories
Can you name three African American women who lived in America before Emancipation?
If you can name three, can you name three more? Often names like Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth leap to mind. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of African American women, who lived in America before Emancipation, who made bold choices in the confines of their circumstances, at a time when society believed they were incapable of doing so. Why can't we name some of them?
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I Will Speak for Myself by Valerie M. Joyce seeks to fill in the gaps left by our history textbooks. This riveting one woman play, performed by Barrymore Award nominated actress, Kimberly S. Fairbanks, tells the stories of 16 real women. Some of them have had books written about them; others only exist as a sentence or a name in a source document. Through a combination of rigorous archival research and performance technique, Valerie and Kimberly have reconstructed their voices, and breathed life into silence and absence.
Most recent performance
The I Will Speak for Myself team recently enjoyed a successful performance at the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House in July 2018.
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We are so grateful for the opportunity to bring these stories to new audiences, especially students.
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Playwright Valerie Joyce was the 2016 recipient of the foundation's Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Fellowship, which provides a working retreat for the development of new work. The latest version of the play, which was performed in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was a product of this program.
