Experiments: The Stones of Life – November 17

The Experiments play reading series has provided a forum for talented playwrights and theatre makers to continue their creative process. The Monday night readings give emerging artists the opportunity to hear their developing works read by professional actors and receive valuable audience feedback. Experiments remains an artist driven service organized around shifting themes to allow a larger, under-served theater community to experience a greater diversity of programming.

The Stones of Life is a courtroom drama set in 1972 Honolulu. The play follows Arthur Washington, a jaded Black defense attorney, on his latest case: representing Pauahi Kukui, a māhū (a non-binary Indigenous Hawaiian) who refuses to comply with a city statute that requires them to misgender themselves in public. As Arthur works to prove Pauahi’s innocence, he finds himself embroiled in the drama at The Glade Show Lounge—a meeting place for Honolulu’s queer community that he’s been avoiding since the death of his boyfriend. He’s also haunted by dreams of the original māhū: four healers who helped Hawai’i during a plague, and the titular monument dedicated to them.

The Stones of Life is an ode to the lives that move beyond convention and the identities that predate it. The story is based on a real law (Honolulu City Statute 711-1101, Subsection 11), often called “Hawai’i’s Scarlet Letter.”

BIOS

Zachariah Ezer is a playwright and an Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at WashU in St. Louis, whose work animates theoretical quandaries through theatrical forms. His plays include The Freedom Industry (Playwrights Horizons’ New Works Lab, The Playwrights Center, New York Stage & Film), Address the Body! (UT Austin’s UTNT Festival, Kitchen Dog Theater’s New Works Festival, Echo Theater Company’s National Young Playwrights-in-Residence), The Single Raindrop (The Civilians’ Findings Series, Rorschach Theatre’s Magic in Rough Spaces, The Fade to Black Arts Festival’s Ensemble Theatre Reading Series), among others.

He is currently a DGF Catalyst Fellow and a member of The St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s Confluence Writers Project. He’s received commissions from Atlantic Theater Company, MTC/Sloan, Theater J, and Theater Masters. He’s attended residencies at The New Harmony Project, Ryder Farm, and Aunt Karen’s Farm. His work has been published by Concord Theatricals/Samuel French, Smith & Kraus, American Blues Theater, and New World Theatre.

Zachariah is also a dramaturg (who has worked with The National Black Theatre, Breaking the Binary, WP Theater, Keen Company, The Workshop Theater, and elsewhere), an essayist (published by the University of Texas’ E3W, Gizmodo/io9, HuffPost, and elsewhere), and a performer (in alternative rock band Harper’s Landing). 

Dominique Rider is a Brooklyn-based director and writer whose work seeks to answer the question: “What is a world unmade by slavery?” while analyzing the layers of anti-blackness that maintain our world. Deploying theatre and performance as tools of Afropessimism, Dominique has developed and staged work with Portland Center Stage, Portland Stage, The Bushwick Starr, The New Group, The Park Avenue Armory, and more. Past fellowships/residencies include The Civilians R&D, The Atlantic, Hi-Arts, The National Black Theatre, TheaterWorks Hartford, NYSAF, BRIC Arts, Roundabout, and NAMT. Dominique is a Vision Resident at Ars Nova, a producer with CLASSIX, and an artist in residence at Duke University. As a writer, Dominique’s work has been published/presented by 3rd Thing Press, The New York Philharmonic, and The Museum of Natural History.