The Royale, a new play at the Kirk Douglas Theater

The Royale(click to hear interviews) is a new play by Marco Ramirez, which has its world premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City. It's the story of a black boxer fighting a white boxing champion around 1910. This play is a good pairing with Joe Turner's Come and Gone at the Mark Taper, one of August Wilson’s century cycle plays, set in Detroit. The theater experience with Royale required a lot of imagination from the audience and turned poetic and surreal at one point. Boxing matches were staged as surreal choreography. There were only five characters, all with great performances. I love all the theater coming to Los Angeles with the African-American themes running through them, like Clybourne Park (Taper), Raisin in the Sun (Kirk Douglas), Joe Turner, and now Royale. It's like a cycle of plays about the black experience in America. These plays are also resonating for me with James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain, about the migration from the South to Chicago, and the nonfiction study by Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, about the great migration from the South to the North over a many years. All these works help me to get a larger picture overall of the migration from South to North and how it is every bit as important to America as the migration from foreign lands in shaping our history. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)has a chapter called Battle Royale which is often anthologized as a short story. In The Royale, near the climax of the play, the protagonist’s boxing trainer tells him of his first boxing match, which is very much like Ellison’s chapter. Overall, this play adds to the body of work, both classic and newly emerging, that is helping fill in the rich history, both painful and uplifting, that makes us who we are today. Live theater truly has a role to play in quilting our cultural experiences together.

The Royale at the Kirk Douglas 2013