NEW RELEASE
The Frank Silvera Writers' Workshop, in partnership with Zoomcatchers and the Billie Holiday Theatre is pleased to present, BARS, Or How Hip-Hop Saved My Life by Germaine Shames and directed by Saffron Quinn and featuring Helene Galek, DJ Davis, Destiny Tompkins, Natania McCleod and Hannibal Tabu. Kimberly Gunn and Garland Thompson Jr. produced this reading.
Synopsis:
When an underpaid Jewish World Lit' professor in the throes of a midlife crisis lands a gig ghostwriting lyrics for a young Black hip-hop producer, racial and sexual tensions collide. In the gritty, vibrant culture of American hip-hop, an unlikely pair of strivers brave the minefield of Black-White confrontation to capitalize on the one bankable commodity they've got: words.
Will their collaboration meet with success or end up one more casualty of a system that values myth over truth? Can music bridge the social barriers of race and class? Can friendship? With rhymed invective and thwarted love, BARS lays bare the personal cost of systemic racism to those, Black and White, caught in its web.
About the Playwright:
Germaine Shames, a Dramatists Guild Foundation Nat’l Fellow, Kilroys List playwright, and recipient of her state's Literary Fellowship in Fiction, is the author of the award-winning novels, Between Two Deserts and You, Fascinating You. Writing under the pen name Casper Silk (Hotel Noir, Echo Year), she has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, and P.D. James "on steroids”.
After covering world conflicts as a correspondent and witnessing firsthand the gamut of senseless tragedies behind the headlines, she realized that hard news could never convey an iota of the deeper story she was gleaning. She turned to fiction writing, learning that she could find light in the most horrific situations and leave readers (and now an audience) with hope.
As a playwright, Shames has celebrated premieres across the U.S. as well as abroad and been recognized in a number of festivals, including LTA Annual Playwriting Competition 2025 (First Place), Women’s Voices 2024, Fulton Theatre's Stories of Diversity 2023, Pegasus Theatre's Fresh Reads 2023 (First Place), Page to Stage 2023, ThinkTank TYA's inaugural Playwrights Festival, Cimientos 2019, and Festival of New American Theatre 2018.
Check out the entire FSWW New Play Reading playlist here!
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