Annenberg Center Remounts Toni Morrison’s Dreaming Emmett with Artist-in-Residence DNAWORKS
- Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
- Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, School of Arts & Sciences
- Extended Artist Engagement Grant
The Annenberg Center’s interest in bringing DNAWORKS to Penn is largely inspired by School of Arts and Sciences' Professor Herman Beavers, who teaches a class on Toni Morrison. Beavers approached the Annenberg Center after learning about Dreaming Emmett and DNAWORKS; he will conduct an independent study around DNAWORKS’ residency and the restaging of Morrison’s work. (Image provided by DNAWORKS)
During the 2021-22 academic year and performance season, the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts will bring DNAWORKS to Penn for the staging and performance of Dreaming Emmett, the first of two plays written by award-winning novelist Toni Morrison. Founded in 2006 by Daniel Banks and Adam McKinney, DNAWORKS is a Fort Worth-based arts and service organization dedicated to furthering artistic expression and dialogue, focusing on issues of identity, culture, class, and heritage. Publicly performed with a workshopped script only once in 1986, Dreaming Emmett is an abstract interpretation of the murder of a young black man named Emmett Till in 1955, and the subsequent trial and acquittal of the accused. After the initial performance, nearly all copies of the script were destroyed, the play was never again performed, and the only remaining artifacts of Dreaming Emmett were critical reviews. Now, 35 years after the original production, Morrison’s estate has approved DNAWORKS to stage Morrison’s original script of the historical retelling of the case that became a global paragon of Southern American racism at the start of the civil rights movement. This performance will be a world premiere of the original script by Toni Morrison, never seen by a public audience.