2021-2022 Push Project Resident

Mission Statement

Artists’ Theater of Boston produces thoughtful, evocative work that challenges systemic injustices facing our communities through the collaborative process of making theater. Partnering with area artists and community organizations, ATB produces low-cost, socially engaged theater challenging the systemic injustices that face our communities. Our commitments to inclusion inform our content and artistic process alike; we foster ongoing and sustained collaboration among artists and opportunities for audience involvement.

Project Description

Artists’ Theater of Boston is honored to partner with notable local poet and writer Ashley-Rose Salomon to develop her first play, The Corner of Flatbush and Blue Hill Ave. The play is inspired by her spoken word poem “America’s Dried Up Well,” which chronicles the 1996 “Love Canal” flood in Roslindale that displaced an entire neighborhood of largely BIPOC, immigrant, and poor folks, without a swift response of care from the city. Though 2021 marks the 25th anniversary of this local tragedy, information on the event is so difficult to find, that googling this event turns up almost no results. Thus, its history lives on primarily through the memories of survivors like Ashley-Rose, and the community who has remained close to her years later. Marrying spoken word performance, music, and staged narrative performance, this new work will explore personal narratives surrounding the disaster as told through the eyes of 11-year-old Ashley-Rose. In addition to her own story, Ashley-Rose will collaborate closely with other survivors of the flood, whom we will honor as key stakeholders in this process.

Artists’ Theater also looks forward to bringing the voices of housing justice activists engaged in critical community work to the process, both as artistic contributors and as session leaders during workshops we hold for our larger community to learn about how to become more active and aware citizens of our city.