Sally: A Solo Play
SALLY—a powerfully moving, one-woman drama set at Monticello in the days before Thomas Jefferson’s death—is a Wharton Center Original Production. Sabrina Sloan, Hamilton’s Angelica Schuyler, brings to the stage a determined Sally, who performs and inhabits Thomas Jefferson, his daughter Martha, and Sally’s brother, James. Amid mounting family tensions, Sally must fight to ensure that Jefferson’s long-ago promise to free their own children from slavery at the age of 21 will be kept.
The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson
In August of 2021, Sandra Seaton’s play with music, The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson with original music by composer Carlos Simon, premiered at the Glimmerglass Festival. In August of 2022, an expanded version of The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson was staged at Glimmerglass Festival with additional performances in 2023 at the Kennedy Center.
Music History or A Play About Greeks and SNCC in 1963
This full-length play brings to life the aspirations and values of African American college students from the South Side and West Side of Chicago. Set at the University of Illinois in 1963, Seaton’s characters variously go through sorority and fraternity initiations, cope with Northern segregation, and join the civil rights struggle in the South.
Nominated for a 2023 Pulitzer Prize!
Dreamland: Tulsa
A performance to remember. A choir of over 100 voices, actors and orchestra, Garrett’s brilliant, resounding hymns and Seaton’s gripping text with its powerful dramatic interludes will transport you to this historic time that has been out of our public psyche for far too long.
The First Bluebird in the Morning
The First Bluebird in the Morning is composer Carlos Simon’s newly-commissioned setting of verses by Sandra Seaton—sobering, heartfelt and moving.
Night Trip
On a July evening in 1958, Wesley and Mack, Black WW II veterans, arrive at their sister’s apartment in Chicago to pick up their niece. Conchetta has been waiting all summer to see her relatives—her grandmother, her aunts, her “play aunts.” The 16 year old’s vision of small town life in Tennessee stands in sharp contrast to the world of steel and concrete she is about to leave.
The Bridge Party
The Bridge Party portrays the strength of a group of black women who gather for their weekly bridge game as they cope with a house-to-house search of the black community in the wake of a lynching. The setting of The Bridge Party is the meeting of an African American women’s bridge club in the South of the 1940’s.
