Snowy Owl and Em-Lou Productions in association with Theatre503 present
£10 Adult Standard
RUNNING TIME: 1 hour
Hakeem is an immigrant from Nigeria, a driven, loyal, righteous guy who’s worked hard to build a career for himself as a scientist. His husband, Jeremy, is white, privileged, American, lazy, unfaithful, unable to grow up, and wracked with guilt.
Free & Proud is a new play examining the dynamics of a messy relationship and how sometimes it takes a disaster in order to make sense of the present.
“Living in New York I see a dichotomy where a class of privileged white people can be so tragically unable to relate to the plight of society’s less privileged. I wanted to write a play that explored a relationship where these two different experiences collide.”
Charles Gershman
Charles Gershman is an award-winning New York-based playwright. His play FREE & PROUD previews this July at Theatre503 before a run in the Edinburgh Fringe and his play THE WAITING GAME, which won the Derek Award for Best Overseas Play at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe, will premiere in New York at 59E59 Theatres in February 2019. Additionally, Charles’ plays have been produced and developed by PlayPenn, the Kennedy Center, Theatre for the New City, LaMaMa ETC, The Playwrights’ Center, Primary Stages, FringeNYC, NYU-Tisch School of the Arts, and the University of Central Florida, among others.
He has been a finalist or semifinalist for some of the major new play development conferences in the U.S., including the O’Neill and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. He has been a teaching artist at The New School and at Davidson College in North Carolina. Also a screenwriter, his screenplay EQUILIBRIUM is in development as an independent feature film.
Charles holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from NYU-Tisch, where he studied closely with Lucas Hnath, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Rinne Groff and received the Future Screenwriters Fellowship and the Chair’s Award for Excellence in Dramatic Writing.
Evening Standard Arts in association with Hiscox...
Free&Proud
Sometimes it takes a disaster to make sense of things. Free&Proud examines the dynamics of a messy relationship with Hakeem, a driven, loyal immigrant from Nigeria who has worked hard to build a career for himself, and his husband Jeremy, a white, privileged, unfaithful American who’s unable to grow up.
