Director's Note
There may be two sides to every coin, but a story often has as many ‘sides’ as there are witnesses. With no two people remembering the details exactly the same. Like a cut and polished gemstone the truth has many facets, each as real and true as the next. But we, as viewers, as people, don’t like our objective truth being multiple choice. We like our facts cold, hard, and irrefutable. In Barbecue we meet Barbara, “a crackhead, alcoholic ho” and her family with their many, many vices trying to perform an intervention on her. Barbara’s story is presented to you through multiple lenses of truth. As a narrator, Barbara is less than reliable. As a person she’s more than just troubled. But she has a gift; one many of us have but deny. She’s a damn good liar. A professional “Lieologist” if you will. She can spin a believable yarn like most addicts, but her sights are set a little higher than her next fix. In her “memoirs” presented here, you will find shades of the tragic life of Whitney Houston, James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, and a lesbian “sanga” too afraid to come out to her fans, because she’s just not famous enough to be honest with them. There’s a lot of truth in this story, maybe too much. And that truth, like all truth, may be much more subjective than we have hoped.
- Aaron Andrade.
Author's Bio
ROBERT O’HARA has received the NAACP Best Play and Best Director Award, the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, two Obies and the Herb Alpert Award. Broadway: Slave Play (Tony Nomination). Off Broadway: He directed the world premieres of Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, Nikkole Salter and Dania Guiria’s In the Continuum, Tarell McCraney’s The Brother/ Sister Plays (Part 2), Colman Domingo’s Wild with Happy, Kirsten Childs’ Bella: An American Tall Tale, Baum and Cheri’s Gun and Powder at Signature Theater, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire at Williamstown Theater Festival, Aziza Barnes’ BLKS at MCC, Inda Craig-Galvan’s Black Superhero Magic Mama at The Geffen Theater, the Universes’ Uni/Son, inspired by the poetry of August Wilson at OSF and Shakespeare’s Macbeth at Denver Center for the Performing Arts, as well as his own plays, Mankind, Bootycandy and Insurrection: Holding History. His plays Zombie: The American and Barbecue world premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theater and The Public Theater, respectively.
THE KENNEDY CENTER
AMERICAN COLLEGE THEATRE FESTIVAL XLVIII
Presented and Produced by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Supported in Part by the Kennedy Center Corporate Fund
The U.S. Department of Education
The National Center for the Performing Arts
This production is entered in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KC/ACTF). The aims of this national theatre education program are to identify and promote quality in college-level theatre production. To this end, each production is eligible for a response by a regional representative and certain students are selected to participate in KC/ACTF programs involving awards, scholarships and special grants for actors, playwrights, designers and critics at both
the regional and national levels.
