In a darkened room, four overhead projectors snap on. A picture of a street in Bronzeville slides onto a movie screen. Behind one of the projectors, Jyreika Guest and Eunice Woods drop two paper cutouts onto the glass surface and move them back and forth. Onscreen, the silhouettes of two well-to-do white women circa 1950 stroll down the street. “Is this it?” they coo. “Is this where the Negro poetess lives?”
“As soon as the words ‘Gwendolyn Brooks’ were spoken, we knew we must have Eve,” says Sarah Fornace, one of Manual Cinema’s five coartistic directors and the director of No Blue Memories. “Eve” is Eve Ewing, the poet and sociologist who was, as it happens, a University of Chicago classmate of Fornace and Drew Dir, another of the coartistic directors. Ewing agreed to write the script as long as she could collaborate with her friend and fellow poet Nate Marshall, and the pair recruited another friend, singer and songwriter Jamila Woods, to compose and perform the musical score with her sister Ayanna.
11/17-11/19: Fri-Sat 6:30 PM, Sun 2 PM Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, Harold Washington Library Center 400 S. State 312-747-4300manualcinema.com Free
