Flyin’ West Exhibit
Archives & Special Collections has installed a new exhibit in the lobby of the Stephen Foster Memorial Building on Pitt’s Oakland campus! The exhibit corresponds to an upcoming show by Pitt Stages called Flyin’ West by playwright and novelist Pearl Cleage. The performance is historical in nature and explores the experiences of a group of African American women who had migrated to the all-black settlement of Nicodemus, Kansas in 1898. The February 2019 performance will take place in the Henry Heymann Theatre in Stephen Foster Memorial.
However, this will not be the first time The Stephen Foster has hosted a production of this particular Pearl Cleage play. Nearly 25 years ago, Eileen Morris of the Ensemble Theatre Company in Houston, Texas, directed the Kuntu Repertory Theatre in a performance of Flyin’ West on the stage of the Stephen Foster Auditorium (now the Charity Randall Theatre). The Kuntu production premiered in September of 1995. This marked the Pittsburgh premiere of the play, which was originally written in 1992.
For those unfamiliar with the Kuntu Repertory Theatre, it was a mainstay of the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Africana Studies and the Pittsburgh community since its beginning in 1974 to its closing in 2013. Founded by Dr. Vernell Lillie and Rob Penny in 1974, the theatre provided a platform for black students, faculty, and staff, as well as black artists and technicians within the larger community. With roots in the Black Arts Movement, each of Kuntu’s performances examined African-American experiences with the goal of creating personal growth and social change.
The exhibit in the lobby of Stephen Foster
displays reproductions of historical materials from the Kuntu Repertory Theatre
Collection. The collection is currently being processed at the University of
Pittsburgh Libraries Archives & Special Collections Department. Materials in the
collection include text-based,
audio, moving image, and photographic records documenting the activities of the
Theatre.
We invite you to visit the Flyin’ West exhibit in the lobby of the Stephen
Foster Memorial until March 2019.
