Witness art, activism, and teen voices unite on stage in a vital evening of theater addressing gun violence. ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence (enoughplays.com) is a nationwide theatre initiative that calls on teens to confront gun violence by creating new works of theatre that spark critical conversations and inspire meaningful action in communities across the country.
Witness art, activism, and teen voices unite on stage in a vital evening of theater addressing gun violence. ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence (enoughplays.com) is a nationwide theatre initiative that calls on teens to confront gun violence by creating new works of theatre that spark critical conversations and inspire meaningful action in communities across the country. The Kennedy Center’s Social Impact and Education departments is proud to host a performance of this year’s six bold 10-minute ENOUGH! plays by six remarkable young writers, selected by a committee of America’s most lauded professional playwrights including David Henry Hwang, Lauren Gunderson, and Idris Goodwin, among others. The evening is presented in collaboration with prominent DMV-area professional theaters, including Signature Theatre, Arena Stage, Round House Theatre, Imagination Stage, Olney Theatre Center, 1st Stage, and The Theatre Lab. The Kennedy Center performance is the cornerstone of a series of readings happening simultaneously across the country (enoughplays.com/reading) in more than fifty communities joining together, setting the stage for change, and saying, "Enough is enough."
Play Synopses
by Niarra C. Bell
What if a single conversation could stop tragedy in its tracks? A young girl risks everything to put that to the test as she confronts the police officer attempting to chase down her beloved brother.
by Amanda Fagan
You're more likely to be struck by lightning than experience a school shooting. Hallie has never been struck by lightning, but she has survived a school shooting, and somehow she must keep on surviving.
by Pepper Fox
For three 911 operators, an ordinary night at work explodes into matters of life and death as they try to guide their callers to safety against increasingly desperate odds.
by Sam Lee Victor
As two parents pack up their child’s dorm room, they come face to face with everything they thought they knew, and everything it is too late to know, about their child, themselves, and each other.
by Justin Cameron Washington
Hip-Hop and theater collide in this poetic ballad of a play, where the lines between victim and suspect, righteous and wicked, and good and evil are blurred in the aftermath of a violent crime.
by Valentine Wulf
A school’s administrative staff contemplate ways to prevent future shootings, including extending school kindness week into school kindness month and giving the principal free reign over an Uzi.
Join us for a FREE film screening in the Justice Forum at the REACH. The Color Purple (2023) is a musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel. The film follows the lifelong struggles of an African American woman living in the South during the early 1900s.
Launched as a partnership between Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinson Group, this program offers internationally acclaimed dance classes for people with Parkinson’s Disease in more than 250 communities and 24 countries.
Dance scholars provide commentary, via wireless headsets, about the choreography, dancers, and history of the art form as Alonzo King LINES Ballet rehearses Deep River.
