A Maroon’s Guide to Time and Space

Houston Premiere
Regional Premiere
World Premiere

Ticket Price

We Suggest $35
More If You Have it
Less if you don't

Location

MATCH
3400 Main St
Houston, TX 77002

Performances

May 26, 2023 -
Jun 17, 2023

Cast & Personnel

Director
Choreography
Cast
Scenic Design
Costume Design
Lighting Design
Video Design
Video Programmer
Sound Design
Prop Design
Stage Manager

The Play

The latest new work from Houston writer, actor, and director Candice D’Meza is a multidisciplinary, immersive theatre piece that blends live performance, music, video, and omniscient cosmic forces to travel the future-telling visions and seizure-fever dreams of heroic abolitionist and conductor of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman.

ABOUT THE PLAY

Led by The Maroon Frequency, the unembodied consciousness of freedom-making African people across all times and dimensions, A Maroon’s Guide to Time and Space invites audiences to board and deboard the time-ship that surrounds them, transcend science as we understand it, and escape their own linear timelines to experience true, abiding, and eternal access to freedom.

Along the way, learn the secret workings of the multiverse, dance to DJ Harriet, attend a live taping of popular talk show host Harriet’s popular talk show, play chess with (but not against) genderless fish people The Nommo, sign after-the-fact release forms, and follow Tubman’s enslaved young self, as she learns her significance to the freedom she imagined and thereby invented for all oppressed peoples across the space-time continuum—for Harriet Tubman was not dreaming of freedom, freedom was dreaming of her. It was, it is, and it always will be.

A Maroon’s Guide to Time and Space is not a play. It is a groundbreaking, mind-expanding exploration of Afrofuturism, an artistic and cultural movement that combines elements of science fiction, fantasy, and African and African American culture.

In the playwright’s own words, “In inviting the audience to experience themselves within this immersive sci-fi production, I’m also inviting everyone into a game of imagination with me, where together we can create new worlds for ourselves that may be more hospitable to our hopes and dreams than the one we are currently in. Now, more than ever, we are in a crisis of imagination and in need of robust options for keeping our hope for this world alive. Who better to use as an example of vision being used to build a new world than Harriet Tubman?”

A consummate artist that thrives on experimentation, D’Meza has activated minds, hearts, and spaces around Houston. As an actor, she has been a regular standout on the Catastrophic stage since 2014. During the pandemic Catastrophic learned she had begun writing for stage and screen and immediately produced her 30 Ways to Get Free, a series of three micro-films.

A Maroon’s Guide to Time and Space represents a variation on the themes explored in that series, but is wildly different in tone, form, and content than anything she has created before. This play that is not a play is an ideal fit for The Catastrophic Theatre and we are so honored to produce its world premiere.

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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