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Donnetta is thrilled to be the first commissioned playwright for the South Carolina New Play Festival.  She is humbled to return to her home state to tell a story inspired by Greenville, SC native and folk legend Josh White. 

Donnetta's newest commissioned work, "Kudzu Calling," is born out of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Southern Writers Festival and will be presented in the coming seasons on the ASF stage. The play is a celebration of Black Southern love that is at once familial, spiritual, and queer. Both expanding and complicating the Southern narrative for the American stage.” 

The Literary Ancestry Essay Series (Curated by playwright Dave Harris) aims to create a collection of personal craft essays by living Black playwrights about the non-living Black playwrights that live on in their work. For this series, we commissioned playwrights to pick one play by a non-living Black playwright and write about how this play impacted their artistry. The essays in this round are written by Vivian J.O. Barnes, Gethsemane Herron-Coward, Nathan Alan Davis, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, and Dave Harris.

https://www.roundabouttheatre.org/literary-ancestry-essay-series

Donnetta is honored to hold the 2022 Omi Osun Joni L. Jones Visiting Performance Artist Residency. Hosted by UT Austin's African and African Diaspora Studies Department. Monday, February 21—Wednesday, February 23, 2022

With all events open to the public! Click HERE to RSVP.

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Monday, Feb 21: Performing Blackness from Both Sides of the Page, or Queerness in Quarantine: A Public Conversation

12-2 pm CST

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Tuesday, Feb 22: Writing as the Actor:  A Writing Workshop

2-4 pm CST

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Wednesday, Feb 23: A Reading of When Leaves Sound Like Water

3-6 pm CST

By Donnetta Lavinia Grays

Directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton
Featuring ensemble member Namir Smallwood

April 6 – May 14, 2023
in the Downstairs Theater

Monique is on the run. From what, she will not say. Showing up on the doorstep of her sister’s Brooklyn brownstone with her timid daughter Sam—and without her husband—their arrival raises more questions than it answers. As the specter of their abandoned life in Georgia creeps back into focus, the family is forced to consider what must be sacrificed to break a cycle of despair. Poetic and heartbreaking, Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s stunning portrait of Black Love explores what it takes to nurture family in an often-cruel world. MORE INFORMATION HERE

 Thornton Wilder’s THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH follows one “everyfamily” through the great struggles and triumphs of the human experience. Led by innovative director Lileana Blain-Cruz in a production that speaks directly to our current moment, this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic with additional material by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a profound reminder that life is always worth living – no matter how difficult things get. Donnetta (as Fitzpatrick) joins a superb cast of 28 led by James Vincent Meredith and Roslyn Ruff as Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, Paige Gilbert and Julian Robertson as their children, Gabby Beans as Sabina, the family maid, and Priscilla Lopez as the Fortune Teller. BUY TICKETS HERE

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4:00 pm EST

October 3, 2021

MORE INFO

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Ingredients for Alchemy: Page, Stage & The Performance of Literature

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Join us for a discussion featuring five Whiting Award winners: playwright Jordan E. Cooper (Ain’t No Mo’, The Ms. Pat Show); actress and playwright Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Where We Stand, Last Night and the Night Before); poet and nonfiction writer Joshua Bennett (Owed, Being Property Once Myself)); playwright Sylvia Khoury (Power Strip and – premiering in New York this fall – Selling Kabul); and fiction writer Steven Dunn (water & power, Our Migrations). The event will be moderated by poet, playwright, nonfiction writer, performer, and dramaturg Lauren Whitehead, who adapted Ta-Nehisi Coates’ award winning memoir, Between the World and Me, for staging at the Apollo Theater, the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and for the TV adaptation on HBO.