Poetic License 2015: subconscious

Poetic License is Poetic Theater Productions’ annual festival of new poetic theater, which has grown from five days to three weeks in the past four years. The fourth annual Poetic License features two fully realized productions of exciting new poetic plays written by company members, a reading series of six new works of poetic theater identified through an open submission process, and three special events: Breaking Our Silence, a celebration of LGBT voices; Love, Redefined, remixes, and re-imaginings of traditional love poems in celebration of non-commercial, non-traditional love; and Generation Now, a showcase of youth voices in poetic theater in partnership with Urban Word NYC, Girl Be Heard, Dare Tactic, viBe Theater Experience and Earsay Youth Voices.

**World Premiere** Paradox of the Urban Cliché

A hustler desperate to get off the block, Ceez comes face to face with both his dreams and his fears one fateful night, giving him the power to change his life forever. Full of passionate love, hip-hop rhythms, and indicative of recent events, PARADOX OF THE URBAN CLICHÉ examines the strength it takes to withstand the Agents of Authority that trap us in the hood of our mind.

“Paradox of the Urban Cliché…draws on hip-hop inflections to map a struggling Harlem couple’s interior lives. Ceez (played with nuance and verve by Jaime Lincoln Smith) falls asleep watching footage of the Eric Garner case; he awakens when Authority and Agent of Authority (Morgan James Nichols and W. Tre Davis) drag him down to the station for an interrogation that turns out to be part criminal, part epistemological.” – Tom Sellar, The Village Voice

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