Jewish Community Center of Washington, DC

Reading: Cream Soda and Crème de Menthe by Caleen Sinette Jennings

Date:
Monday, June 23, 2014
Time:
7:30 PM - 12:00 AM
Location:
Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater
1529 16th Street NW
Washington, DC 20036

Tj-locally grownReading: Cream Soda and Crème de Menthe
By Caleen Sinette Jennings
Monday, June 23 at 7:30 pm
Directed by Eleanor Holdridge
Locally Grown: Community Supported Art Festival
Tickets: $10/ person

Cream Soda and Crème de Menthe, is a semi-autobiographical, coming of age play about  Jacqueline Marie Butler, a 12-year old black girl growing up in 1960’s Queens, New York.  This daughter of a doctor and a teacher negotiates difficult class issues in her black neighborhood.  Just when she thinks she’s figured out her place, her parents put her in a predominantly Jewish progressive school in Greenwich Village.  Jacqueline discovers a whole new city and a whole new world as she negotiates race, class, politics and culture in challenging classrooms and in her blossoming social life.   With the music of The Shirelles, The Miracles, The Beatles and Joan Baez as a backdrop, Jacqueline’s tender new identity is shaped by Black-Jewish relationships  and a powerful phase in the Civil Rights Movement.

Caleen Sinette JenningsCaleen Sinette Jennings is an actor, director and playwright who is a founding member of The Welders, a new D.C. Playwrights’ Collective. Eight of her plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing Company, and her work has appeared in 7 play anthologies. She has received playwriting awards from the Kennedy Center and The Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, as well as two nominations for outstanding new play from the Helen Hayes Awards. Her plays have been produced at the Kennedy Center, Imagination Stage, The Folger and Source Theatres.   Caleen is Professor of Theatre in the Department of Performing Arts at American University in Washington, D.C. where she joined the faculty in 1989. She teaches Acting, Directing, Playwriting, Voice & Speech, Acting Shakespeare, Theatre History, Children’s Theatre and 5 different courses in General Education.  In 2003, she received A.U.’s Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award. She has also been a faculty member of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute since 1994.  Caleen grew up in Queens, New York and attended Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village.  In 1965, she moved to Nigeria with her family and attended the International School, Ibadan.  She came back to the U.S to graduate from Bennington College in 1972. She went on to get her M.F.A. in Acting from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

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