Black Out Night
2024-25 Season:
- August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson on Thursday, October 24, 2024, at 7:30 pm
Black Out Night is a purposeful, exciting creation of an environment in which an audience, self-identifying as Black, can come together and experience a performance in community. A reception will follow the performance, providing an opportunity for the audience to discuss their experience and socialize. Non-Black-identifying patrons have the option to attend or to select a different performance.
Other theaters in the Los Angeles area (Center Theater Group, Boston Court) and throughout the country have held Black Out Nights for performances. A Noise Within held our first during the run of Radio Golf on October 20, 2022. Based on the success of the event, we are excited to continue the event.
Purchase tickets securely online here or call the Box Office at 626.356.3100.
History
from blackoutnite.com
A concept birthed by Slave Play playwright Jeremy O. Harris, the inaugural BLACK OUT night took place on September 18, 2019. For the first time in history, all 804 seats of Broadway’s Golden Theatre were occupied by Black-identifying audience members in communion, celebration, and recognition of Broadway’s rich, diverse, and fraught history of Black work. Based on the success of the first BLACK OUT, Slave Play hosted a second BLACK OUT on January 8, 2020, to bookend its Broadway run. Since then, other BLACK OUT events have organically taken hold. It is our hope and intention that this site inspires, facilitates, and informs future BLACK OUT events and, in the words of Harris, that “this outreach will snowball into more representation of Black bodies, both onstage and off.”
Articles
New York Times: At Black Out performances, the power of healing through community (2019)
Photo by Ian Foxx.