Image courtesy The Bushwick Starr.
Tickets: FREE, RSVP required
RSVP here
Co-Presented with The Bushwick Starr
Tuesday, April 5, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ife Olujobi: MARKETPLACE
Additional Starr Reading Series programs:
Monday, March 28, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ro Reddick: Throwback Island
Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Nkenna Akunna: cheeky little brown
Monday, April 4, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Amara Brady: the beautiful things are gonna kill you
Since 2010, The Bushwick Starr’s annual Starr Reading Series has cultivated a diverse group of writers at all stages of their careers, who approach writing for the theater in thrilling and unexpected ways. Selected through an invited submission process by a rotating committee of curators, currently Jehan O. Young, Elizagrace Madrone, and William Burke, 4-8 playwrights are selected each year, and receive developmental support for a public staged reading of a new, usually unfinished, work. With The Bushwick Starr’s new permanent home currently under renovation, the 2022 Starr Reading Series will take place at, and is co-presented by, CPR – Center for Performance Research, uniting the process-oriented missions of both organizations, and celebrating the incubation of new, experimental work in performance. The Starr Reading Series has previously supported new plays by writers including Whitney White, Clare Barron, Phillip Howze, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Haruna Lee, and many more.
MARKETPLACE is a practical reverie, a theoretical bonfire of corporeal exchange, a pageant of movement vignettes that explores the relationship between bodies, capital, labor, intimacy, and reciprocity, reveling in the sometimes miraculous, sometimes banal ways that we love and hurt each other while trying to get what we need to survive.
Ife Olujobi (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based Nigerian-American playwright, screenwriter, and editor from Columbia, MD. She is a 2020-22 Resident Artist at Ars Nova, a member of the Obie-winning Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre, a 2019-20 New Voices Fellow at The Lark, an alumnus of both the 2018-19 Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater and the 2020 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, an inaugural Project Number One artist-in-residence at Soho Rep, and the recipient of a 2020 Sloan Foundation commission from Manhattan Theatre Club. Their play Jordans won a special commendation from the 2021 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and they are the recipient of a 2021 Steinberg Playwright Award. Their plays include Smoke, MARKETPLACE, Color Girls and others, and their work has been seen at The Public, Ensemble Studio Theatre, HERE Arts Center, Bishop Arts Theater Center, and more. She also conceived and edited a book of interviews with theater artists during the pandemic called No Play, is the founder and editor of Townies zine, managing editor of The Supplements at Soho Rep, and a former assistant editor at the Criterion Collection. They received their BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2016.
The Bushwick Starr is grateful to partner with CPR in co-presenting and hosting the annual Starr Reading Series as they build their new permanent home in Bushwick! The grand opening of The Bushwick Starr’s new venue will take place in about a year, but you can be a part of the celebration today! Please consider joining the Starr Giving Galaxy, a community of donors, friends, and audiences making an ongoing commitment to the Starr's future. Your support will help our artists create groundbreaking new performances, and establish a lasting home for the arts and culture in North Brooklyn for all to enjoy.
Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.