Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Theater & Music Theater presents When Pages Breathe: American Black/Out

The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton University presents When Pages Breathe: American Black/Out, a lecture-performance that presents scenes and monologues ranging from the rich historical lineage of Black American theater to a live resistance-driven narrative lecture on culture and power. The lecture-performance is presented and performed by Anya Pearson, a 2021-22 Princeton Hodder Fellow, and Drama Desk winner Chesney Snow, lecturer in the Program in Theater and Music Theater, who are co-directing, and features senior Destine Harrison-Williams. Performances are December 5 at 8 p.m. and December 6 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. in the Wallace Theater at the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton campus. Free and open to the public, tickets can be reserved through University Ticketing. The Wallace Theater is fully accessible with an assistive listening system. The 2 p.m. performance on December 6 will be open captioned. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.

The works to be presented, notes Snow, “include playwrights and poets who have resisted authoritarian narrative capture over the last century. It archives suppressed histories and invites audiences to resist erasure through community dialogue and organizing.”

When Pages Breathe is a collaborative series between Princeton University Library’s Special Collections and the Program in Theater and Music Theater, created and curated by Snow. Pearson and Snow met earlier this fall with Jennifer Garcon, librarian for Modern and Contemporary Special Collections at the library, to review the University’s related archives. The series is dedicated to the late William Noel, the John T. Maltsberger III ’55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections. This year’s series is presented in collaboration with Princeton’s Black Theater Collective.

Harrison-Williams’ work on the project represents his independent work toward a minor in the Program in Theater and Music Theater. An English major from Miami, he is also minoring in creative writing. He has performed in Lewis Center productions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Naomi Iizuka’s Anon(ymous) and with Princeton Summer Theater. He is a member of the Princeton Playhouse Ensembles and a teaching fellow with Trenton Arts at Princeton, and he has been recognized by the Lewis Center’s Sandberg Fund, Mallach Senior Thesis Fund, Mary Quaintance ’84 Fund for the Creative Arts, and the Bernstein Arts Leadership Fellowship, which supported an internship with American Repertory Theater.

Lecturer in Theater Chesney Snow. Photo courtesy Chesney Snow.

Snow is a Drama Desk Award-winning interdisciplinary artist who works as a performer, composer, lyricist, sound designer, and teaching artist. His recent collaborations include Skeleton Crew on Broadway, Walks of Life at La Jolla Playhouse, Upstream at Syracuse Stage, which he wrote and starred in, as well as Soil Beneath off-Broadway at Primary Stages, and Crowns and Princeton and Slavery Plays at McCarter Theatre, among others. Considered a pioneering figure in American beatbox culture, Snow co-founded the American Beatbox Championships, where he served as the executive producer for seven years. He has performed live with KRS One, Kayah, Eternia, Hasan Salaam, Kate Havnevik, and Nile Rodgers, and he has opened for legendary performers including Snoop Dogg, MC Lyte, Pharoah Monch, Immortal Technique, Gloria Gaynor, Sister Sledge, Hot Chocolate, and the Village People. For over two decades, Snow’s work as an educator has centered on engaging the arts as a vehicle for social change and empowerment. He has taught workshops and masterclasses in countless prisons, hospitals, public and private schools, for the U.S. Department of State, and universities including New York University, Juilliard, Yale University, and Harvard University.

2021-22 Hodder Fellow Anya Pearson. Photo courtesy Anya Pearson.

Pearson is an award-winning playwright, poet, screenwriter, actress, and activist. A 2021-22 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, she was a finalist for Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program (2023), for the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting at Brown University (2020), and the National Black Theatre’s Playwriting Residency (2019). She is a 2025 Advance Gender Equity (AGE) in the Arts Legacy Playwright. Her plays include: The Measure of Innocence, named to The Kilroys List, recipient of a Portland Area Theatre Alliance Drammy Award, and finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Made to Dance in Burning Buildings, showcased at Joe’s Pub in New York City and Shaking the Tree Theatre in Portland, Oregon; The Killing Fields, commissioned in 2018 by Orphic and workshopped at Seven Devils New Play Foundry, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and New York Classical Theatre; Without a Formal Declaration of War, a Portland Center Stage commission workshopped at Seven Devils, Great Plains, and JAW New Play Festival; Butterflies Eat Decay, developed and workshopped at The Road Theatre Company’s Under Construction Cohort 4 and LineStorm Playwrights’ Go Play Outside program; and Three Love Songs, commissioned by Portland Center Stage’s Play at Home initiative. She has received residencies from UCROSS Foundation and Kripalu’s Artists and Activists Program and is under commission at Portland Center Stage and Many Hats. She is currently at work on a four-play cycle reimagining the Oresteia through an African American lens and a number of other projects, many of which advocate for survivors of sexual and domestic violence, BIPOC communities, the chronically ill, those with rare diseases, and the disabled.

Video

Anya Pearson and Chesney Snow discuss their upcoming lecture-performance, When Pages Breathe: American Black/Out.

Video Transcript

Video Transcript: Snow and Pearson Discuss American Black/Out

Chesney Snow:

Hi, I’m Chesney Snow, lecturer here at the Lewis Center for the Arts in the program in Theater and Music Theater. And I’m here with the great Anya Pearson, who is a 2022-2023 Hodder Fellow who’s joining me for a lecture for “When Pages Breathe.” Thank you so much for joining me. Yeah.

Anya Pearson:

Thank you for having me.

Chesney Snow:

[Chesney Snow is lecturer in the Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton] So, I guess one of the questions that I would have, you know, is like, what’s really surprised you about this work that you’ve been researching here with me as we prepare this lecture?

Anya Pearson:

[Anya Pearson is a 2021-22 Princeton Hodder Fellow] That’s a great question. I would say one of the first things that surprised me is how easy the flow has been. Like, I think we work really well together. We have some great kind of shared interests, kindred spirits going on. I think another thing that really surprises me, unfortunately, is how little has changed between 1925 and what Zora Neale Hurston was writing about and Langston Hughes was writing about, and what playwrights of today, like myself are writing about in terms of being a Black artist who’s speaking truth to power and writing in opposition to fascism and authoritarianism.

Chesney Snow:

So, I mean, I’d say one of the things that’s really surprised me was the brilliance of your work. Just to give you an idea of what, we’re doing a lecture and a performance, so we’ll be performing as well with one of our students here, Destine, who’s graduating this year.

Anya Pearson:

Shout out to Destine.

Chesney Snow:

Yep. And so not only are we bringing the text and the history and the research, but we’re also performing scenes and one of the scenes that you have is “Measure of Innocence.” Could you talk a little bit about that play that you’re contributing to this piece?

Anya Pearson:

Sure, yeah, so the “Measure of Innocence” is a reimagining of “Measure For Measure” by Shakespeare. One of his problem plays. I was commissioned to adapt that play, “Measure For Measure,” through an African-American lens pre-pandemic. So at the tail end of Trump’s presidency, the first one, looking at mass incarceration of black bodies. And it was a really interesting time to be a Black woman, writing about, not only the first Trump presidency, but also the kind of lineage of the rise of mass incarceration, what it meant to be living while Black and the danger of living while Black, right? Because the play was supposed to premiere in March 2020, right before COVID. And so this was pre-George Floyd, and one of the characters in the play is actually killed by the police and is saying like, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”

And so revisiting it to work on this was really challenging because it dives really deep into systemic racism, the government’s involvement in the legacy of slavery, the way in which it has always been dangerous to be a Black person in this country. But as we see right now, it continues to be not only dangerous, but also, we see the government wanting to go back and whitewash the way in which it has always been dangerous to be a Black person. And so it felt important, as we were talking about writing in opposition to authoritarianism to talk about, right, the legacy of the way in which oppression and government involvement has always been a part of the danger to Black people in this country and continues to be a danger, even though they’re trying to pretend as if, right, it’s not.

Chesney Snow:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m just really honored to be rocking on this with you.

Anya Pearson:

Likewise.

Chesney Snow:

And this series, you know, we created a couple of years ago was really about bringing pages to life, you know? And bringing great literature to life. And with what we see happening in the world today around authoritarian narrative capture and erasure, I just really wanted to look back to our playwrights and our poets and see like, how did they resist?

And hopefully that will give us a toolkit or inspiration to be able to confront the challenges that we find ourselves facing, not just in academia, but like on the street, right?

In our lives. So I hope you guys will join us for this lecture series, taking place December 5th and December 6th. The link is in the information of the Lewis Center for the Arts website. Thank you so much.

The three performances will be enriched with additional programming. On December 5 a post-show audience talkback will include Pearson, Snow, Harrison-Williams, and playwright Gloria Majule. Majule is 2025-26 Next Forever artist, one of two selected for this year in a partnership among the Lewis Center, High Meadows Environmental Institute, and The Civilians theater company that commissions new works that engage vital environmental subjects and provide the vision and inspiration society needs to navigate the challenges of the planet’s future. The talkback will be moderated by Assistant Professor of Theater Rhaisa Williams. Following the December 6 matinee performance, a panel discussion will include alumni Kelvin Dinkins, Jr. ’09, former executive director of American Repertory Theater at Harvard University; abigail jean-baptiste ’18, a New York City-based writer and director; Pearson; and Snow, moderated by Jallicia Jolly, visiting scholar in Princeton’s Center on Transnational Policing and the Effron Center for the Study of America. On December 7 at 7 p.m. the student group ForWord Collective will present Free-For-All, “an evening showcasing student and community voices in their rawest form.” This fall 2025 showcase features original spoken word performances, food, and live music “open to all to listen, engage and be present together.”

Student members of the production team include Louise Sanches Barbosa as lighting designer, mentored by faculty member Tess James, and Grace Wang as sound designer.

Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about this event, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.

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