Kimberly Dixon-Mays

In the pursuit of joy, does method matter? Ash is an engineer by training; sister Harley is into improv comedy. They only have two things in common: a flair for sisterly teasing, and grief about their family’s losses. When they take up a shared project about joy, comedy ensues – but their differences threaten to stop their mission before it gets off the ground.
Loosely inspired by Br'er Rabbit stories and A.A. Milne's "Cherry Stones."

This revision of The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz takes on race and gender identity with an adult, vaudeville sensibility. It features Dorothy, traveling companions Baby-Girl and Hotsy and nemesis Mother May I and her henchmen No-You-Mayn’t, as well as a Gizzard wizard who gives them what they want – if not what they asked for.

People have always mistaken Kitt for other Black women. Now she’s made it a business, standing in for Black women at those annoying in-person moments they’d pay good money to avoid. But when people start objecting to her service, including her new business partner, Kitt realizes it isn’t just a party trick. It’s about power, for her clients and herself. And the slyest trick of all is keeping some.

Bump is a love letter to black men’s funny, heartbreaking, audacious language. Ray lies mute as friends Yul and Zeke try to decipher his inexplicable silence. Yul's question “How you get like this?!” propels them into Ray’s patchwork memories: We see Ray give up speech bit by bit, seemingly due to the other men's closed-mouthedness. Then Yul and Zeke reclaim the narrative in no uncertain terms, freeing them all.

An artist has her work and very private life interrupted by a trace of her past: the niece of her long-lost, recently-passed college friend that she’s never met. Using their words, hands, and off-kilter imaginations, both women wrestle over what kind of connection they owe each other, and how that debt is reflected through the glass of their individual and collective histories.

In a world where pre-teens choose their life’s path with help from biotechnology, it's Xander's decision day visit to the transformation facility. Xander has a lot of questions about who they want to become – they're just not sure they want to know the answer.

Four different Black women, four different eras, each facing a life-changing decision around blood. As their stories unfold, we come to realize that their lives are interconnected. More important, they share a similar fate: in their pursuit of self-determination, they must make peace with leaving something, or someone, behind.

Cheryl has come to the morgue for her brother’s body, but can’t let him rest in peace.

Faye and her best friend Shirley await the moon landing, among other things.

Two months before the start of a man's 75th year, he attempts to get through some spring cleaning with his visiting adult daughter, without acknowledging the birthday elephant in the room.

Before she and Adam leave the Garden, Eve has a few questions.

This play is about the complicated and corrupting power dynamics in relationships that cross race and gender lines in 21st C America, through a seemingly simple, pure subject. At the center are a white male author in his 60s famous for writing children’s books celebrating black children, who is now dying and looking to appoint a head of his library and foundation. A Black female doctoral student is trying to convince him to give her that job. The two find out that they may be more connected than they thought. This spurs them to jockey for power over not only the author's literary legacy, but also his life story. Their vying also enlists their allies: his daughter, her father, and one more character who has no qualms switching sides to make his own power play. One of them wins, but all wind up wounded by a battle that started long before they met.

In Borne Dust, a 30-something Black woman finds her tentative entrance into domestic bliss getting more unfamiliar and suffocating with every step. So after too many of the women in her life drown her in warnings and war stories, she goes AWOL. But instead of this solving things, her world gets even more disorienting as strange people come looking for even stranger answers. Will she find a way to answer to them, and herself?

A play about how The Talk that black parents have with their children is now fractured by time, place and circumstance. Loosely based on the Little Rock Nine who helped desegregate the U.S. school system in the early 1950’s, the play explores the tangled subject – childhood, race, privilege, self-worth, hope – in a kind of elegy. It flickers between that historic moment and later decades, with composite characters from history as well as “ordinary” inventions, to tell a larger story of memory, legacy and identity. The play aims to tell the truth of the desegregation story, if not the facts.

An estranged brother and sister make one last attempt to connect across mental illness, drug use and alienation to become the family the other needs. They are aided by two elders who already know the unpredictability of blood ties.

On Christmas Eve, Della and Jim have planned a romantic gift-exchange at home. But neither one is a wiseman, and they’re no longer young lovers, so it’s far from a storybook ending.