A Maroon’s Guide to Time and Space
Houston Premiere
Regional Premiere
World Premiere
Performances
May 26, 2023 -
Jun 17, 2023
Cast & Personnel
Director
Scenic Design
Costume Design
Lighting Design
The Play
The latest work by local interdisciplinary theatre artist Candice D’Meza is a genre blending, experiential exploration of the quantum mechanics that use imagination to liberate oneself from the confines of linear time. A thematic continuation of D’Meza’s surreal, Afrofuturist film series 30 Ways to Get Free, also produced by Catastrophic, A Maroon’s Guide uses film, technology, performance, and audience imagination to create the perfect environment to escape into space—where a new and better world is waiting for us.
A Maroon’s Guide is D’Meza’s third original performance piece, following Fatherland at Stages, 30 Ways to Get Free, and Wail at Diverseworks Artspace. A consummate theatre artist and self-described “artivist,” D’Meza’s first performed at Catastrophic in 2014 but she has dazzled on most Houston stages and her acting plaudits are many. As a creator of new work for the theatre, her star is on a meteoric rise.
The Playwright
CANDICE D'MEZA is a mother of three, actor, writer, filmmaker, and multi-disciplinary artist whose writing and acting work has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Acentos Review, The Houston Chronicle, HoustoniaMag, and the Houston Press. As an actor, Candice is a proud member of the Actor’s Equity Union and has acted with The Catastrophic Theatre, The Ensemble Theatre, Rec Room, and The Alley Theatre. She has been called a “Houston Theater Actor To Watch” and awarded four awards, including the 2018 Best Utility Player Award, by the Houston Press. Her writing-- using forms of memoir, prose, and playwriting--focuses on topics of grief and joy, restorative justice, abolition, and liberation as viewed through the Black Imagination--the mixing of science fiction, African and African Diasporic folklore, and afrofuturism. Her one-woman show FATHERLAND combines Haitian Vodou spirituality and personal memoir with experimental film and ritual theater into a multimedia layered performance that is a deeply vulnerable exploration into the grief that comes from disconnection: disconnection from family, from culture, from homelands. Her ongoing work 30 WAYS TO GET FREE is a series of micro-plays that explore, via sci-fi, African folklore, afrofuturism, magical surrealism, and speculative fiction, the unlimited ways that Black people across the African Diaspora may triumphantly enter into a free world of our own imagining. To date, selected pieces have been published in The Acentos Review, produced as commissioned plays by the Latinx Playwrights Circle in New York, and produced as short films by The Catastrophic Theatre. Her newest project, a commission by DiverseWorks in Houston, TX is a community created multi-disciplinary public performance to honor the legacy of the Sugarland 95--the 95 bodies of Black convict leased inmates who died between 1897-1907, found in unmarked graves in Sugarland, Texas. To discover more about her work, visit www.candicedmeza.com
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