Award winning Black Lives Matters playwright and former attorney has a zoom reading for his expanded Fringe Festival standout. Interview by Ellen Pober Rittberg

INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT ROBERT BOWIE, JR.         
By Ellen Pober Rittberg

           Its not every day that a Super Lawyer” leaves it all behind to become a full-time successful award-winning playwright whose plays receive rave reviews and sell out at New Yorks 2018 Fringe Festival. But thats exactly what Robert Bowie Jr. has managed to do. An expanded version of his Fringe play, previously called, Onaje, and now called The Grace of God and the Man Machine, will be presented as a zoom play reading on Sunday, October 25th at 8:00pm Eastern Time, with a TALK BACK with audience participation facilitated by the plays director and JOCUNDA FESTIVAL producer, Van Dirk Fisher.

          The plot is about two men, one a Black citizen and the other, a white citizen who worked together as a commercial fishermen on Marylands Eastern Shore during the racially tumultuous 1960s and a monumental event that occurred which changed the course of both their lives and their sons'. Now grown, the two sons meet by chance on the road in the early 1980s, without having a clue that their fathers lives intersected in the earlier period. The play poses the question that if we cant change the past, how do we reckon with it and possibly alter the course of the future?

          Bowie, who was raised in Massachusetts, but moved to Baltimore in 1974, visited the Eastern Shore in the 1960s when he was growing up-his mother is from there. Recalling his earlier visits, he says, The Eastern Shore in the 1960s was more like Mississippi than the rest of Maryland. Black citizens were subjected to a very clear Jim Crow culture.” When asked to give one example, he says, I noticed that Black citizens didnt make eye contact with [white] strangers,” out of fear of what might happen if they did.

          Bowie has written ten plays which have been produced, many of which were winning entries in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, a play competition that attracts as many as two hundred applicants. This led to multiple play readings and subsequent full productions at a number of local Baltimore theaters. The one-time commercial litigator left the practice of law in 2013 to become a full-time playwright. Deciding to learn what he felt he needed to know, he enrolled in The Commercial Theater Institute (CTI”.) There he met Sue Marinello, Christian De Gré, and Mind the Art Entertainment, the play's producers. Their aim is to bring the play to Broadway.

          The pandemic may have changed their time horizon, but not their determination to bring the play to New York. Having a zoom play-reading with a New York director where anyone with a computer or device can watch the play is the closest thing to getting the play on its feet until live theater re-commences.

Tickets for the one-time play reading can be purchased by going to:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nS9PhZTyTMimDacMyxCCeA

Donation: $15.00 to benefit Riant Theatre.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

 
             

About Ellen Pober Rittberg  

Award winning journalist Ellen Pober Rittberg's plays have appeared on stages and in festivals in NYC to standing room crowds. A published nonfiction author and performance poet,  her plays deal with the most pressing social and political issues of our time: power, freedom democracy and choices in extreme times and venues.  Her play SABBATH ELEVATOR will be in the JOCUNDA FESTIVAL'S Virtual Play Reading Series on Sunday, November 8th at 8PM.  For tickets click here.

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