Zachariah Ezer & Dominique Rider

2022CRITICAL BREAKS

Oct 27

Zachariah Ezer (he/him/his) is a playwright whose work animates theoretical quandaries through dramaturgical forms. His plays include The Freedom Industry (New York Stage & Film), Community Policing (The Echo Theater Company), and Speedrun (The Prelude Festival), among others. He is currently a James A. Michener Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin, the Dramaturg-in-Residence at The Workshop Theater, and a performer in the alternative rock band Harper’s Landing.

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Dominique Rider is a Brooklyn-based director and curator. Dominique has developed and staged work with Audible, The New Group, New York Theatre Workshop, Roundabout, The Atlantic, Princeton, Rattlestick, BRIC Arts, Two River, Portland Center Stage, and more. Past fellowships and residencies include TheaterWorks Hartford, New York Stage and Film, BRIC Arts, Roundabout, and National Alliance for Musical Theatre. Currently, Dominique is a resident director at The National Black Theatre and a producer with CLASSIX.

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This CRITICAL BREAKS duo is in search of the narrative arc of the slave in the tryptic An Unclear World: Experiments in Afropessimism. Though the Black actors shift from playing heroes to villains to something in between, they all discover what it means to be socially dead and what hidden power that can give them in service of the end of their (unclear) world.

“Using our academic and theatrical training, we use the medium of performance to create an aesthetic language for Afropessimism. Our work manifests itself as propaganda, ready-made to push civil society closer to the abyss: a decent substitute when a weapon is not readily at hand. We know well that the world has been made possible only through the gratuitous violence of antiblackness, and that it can only be unmade through the gratuitous freedom that comes from abolition.”
— Zachariah Ezer & Dominique Rider