A Song for Coretta is nominated for two Black Theatre Alliance Awards!

The Black Theatre Alliance Awards announced their 2009 nominations, and we were excited and proud to see two actors from A Song for Coretta among the talented artists being honored:
The Ethel Waters Award – Best Performance In An Ensemble (Actress)
Kierra Bunch – From The Mississippi Delta – eta Creative Arts Foundation
Kristy M. Johnson – A Song [...]

Cleage – Upcoming Playwright Scholar Series!

Eclipse puts on several Playwright Scholar Series events each season to give the audience a deeper look into each writers canon.
This Saturday, August 1st at 2pm, we will be exploring the prose, poetry and essays of Pearl Cleage.
Ensemble members JP Pierson and Sarah Moeller selected inspirational excerpts out of her writing and brought these pieces [...]

Watch scenes from A Song for Coretta

Stagechannel.com has two video clips of scenes from A Song for Coretta – click the images below to watch.
In the first scene, Zora (Niccole Thurman) interviews Helen (TayLar) about her memory of Mrs. King:
In scene two, Helen (TayLar) and Keisha (Kristy Johnson) have a hard time seeing eye to eye across the generation gap:

Friday photo rescue

From the currently-running, Jeff-Recommended A Song for Coretta by Pearl Cleage – I promise the whole show isn’t this sad, but this moment between Keisha (Kristy Johnson, left) and Mona Lisa (Kelly Owens) is beautiful:

A Song for Coretta is Jeff Recommended!

I received an email yesterday morning from the Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee – a week after winning two awards at the 2009 ceremony, we’re already in the running for next year.
Congratulations to everyone involved!

Opening Night

The last few nights of previews for Pearl Cleage’s A Song for Coretta have been great – so great, in fact, that I haven’t been able to get a seat since Thursday. So I’ve been listening from the lobby and talking to audiences after the show as the cast and crew make the final push [...]

Fifteen days

I’ve spent the last few days creating an Eclipse Intranet for our office staff to use (with great thanks to the fine folks at Google), and I had a moment of total disbelief when I set up a tool that counts down the days to each production. I put in the date of Opening Night [...]

A beautiful Song

After almost 24 hours of free time (we had our last performance of Blue Surge on Sunday), we’ve already started to work on the next project – the Chicago Premiere of Pearl Cleage’s new play A Song for Coretta.
There was a lot of energy at last night’s First Rehearsal – the cast was ready to [...]

Returning to Pearl

We still have two weeks left in our run of Rebecca Gilman’s Blue Surge (and there are some tickets left!), but we’re already starting to get excited about revisiting 2007 featured playwright Pearl Cleage.
In less than two weeks, we’ll begin rehearsals for A Song for Coretta, a beautiful play about five women who gather in [...]