Shipping & Handling is a project that explores how our humanity will be measured within the soon to be robotic-reality on the horizon; and it intentionally roots that interrogation in the Black Feminine gaze. The play is structured as an evening out at the theater told in reverse order: moving from an afterparty with actors, to the playwright’s experimental talkback, to the performance of the official ‘play’ itself. In telling the story out of sequence, Shipping & Handling scrambles the built-in expectations of performative trauma around Black plays and undermines the dominant white gaze of theater itself. The first half of Shipping & Handling names the various poisons polluting Black creative expression and actively transmutes them; the second half illustrates the potential of a new world without the weight of said labor.

*Please contact playwright to read full script.