Media Archive

“Moby-Dick” winnows through its genre-hopping source, extracting universal themes from the novel. Unlike “Great Comet,” however, “Moby-Dick” is a quintessentially American work, addressing topics from the 19th century that remain relevant today.

“We didn’t want to just tell the story. We wanted to embrace the novel’s insane sprawling nature, the experimentation with form, and the fact that it goes off on these wild digressions…,” says Malloy.

“This is famously the ‘Great American Novel’ that Melville was using in 1851 to examine the period and think about everything that was tearing the country apart in that moment,” Chavkin said. “That was something that Dave and I took really seriously in thinking about this version now, and what that would look like and feel like in the 21st century.”

Host Jim Braude speaks with Boston Globe Columnist Jeneé Osterheldt and Deadria Harrington, the producing artistic leader of The Movement Theatre Company.

Aleshea Harris contemplates the black body. It is a celebration and a battlefield, a terrain upon which a nation’s racism is enacted.

Playwright Aleshea Harris has not just written a performance in her production, “What to Send Up When It Goes Down.” She has created a space, a community ritual and the opportunity for black audience members to breathe.

Every day is a struggle so normalized we just deal with the scrapes, scratches, and big, blue bruises. We keep smiling, keep thriving, keep moving along. Until something stops us and forces us to catch our breath. Thursday night at Hibernian Hall in Roxbury, a little less than 100 people gathered for a play, The Movement Theatre Company’s production of “What to Send Up When It Goes Down” by Aleshea Harris.

Framed as a kind of ritual, [What to Send Up…] offers an array of scenes touching on police brutality, microaggressions, and racial resentment. Playwright Brandon Jacob-Jenkins speaks to Harris about her play, which seeks to give a theatrical shape to rage and absurdity.