“We are all born with a bruise or two.
A mark of our roots.
For some of us they fade, for some of us they stay.
But we are all born with them.”
(The Red Paint, prologue)
The Red Paint is about breaking cycles of violence. The play centers on Xochitl, a young woman who seeks to understand her father and in the process learns her own history. Her father tells the story of her family and is proud, until she begins to ask where her sorrow, her anger, and her shame come from. Enraged, the father turns on his daughter. His anger emerges from his own shame, a shame that makes him confront a past that is filled with brutality, violence, and pain. Xochitl realizes this is her inheritance. Flowers are born out of pots. The world ends. The cycle stops. And then it doesn’t.
The Red Paint is the annual Senior Slot show at Brown University Theatre for 2015. The Senior Slot show is reserved for a production proposed, written, and directed by a Brown undergraduate senior student. Structured cyclically, moving between 1954 and the present, The Red Paint opens up a way to healing through poetic language and stirring imagery.
Writer and director, Nikteha Salazar ’16, is a senior at Brown University. She began writing The Red Paint in her sophomore year, first through a playwriting class taught by Associate Professor Elmo Terry-Morgan, and later through a class taught by Rick Burkhardt ’16 MFA. The play draws on Salazar’s personal history as well as her time at Brown University, and her experiences as a performer, director, and now as the Chair of Sock & Buskin, the student-faculty-staff board that selects and runs the mainstage theatre season at Brown University.
Writer and director, Nikteha Salazar ’16 said:
This show contains a lot of ugly truths about not only the world, but about my world. Yet it has led me on a path of healing and understanding. The Red Paint started as a way for me to understand my own identity. As a survivor of violence, I felt much shame associated with what I “let” happen to me. I held onto that shame and found myself falling into the same cycles so many others have fallen into before me. This work was my way out.
As a Mexican, Native American, Russian-Jewish young woman from a poor, semi-rural town in Massachusetts who now finds herself in a position of enormous privilege as a student at Brown, I want to use that privilege to do something. To say something. This is a show dedicated to my father, and to all my fathers. This is a show about collective memory and human understanding. This is a show about forgiveness. This is a show about breaking the cycle. And I’m breaking it.
The Red Paint is produced by the Brown University Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and by Sock & Buskin, the student-faculty-staff board that selects and runs the mainstage theatre season at Brown University. The show runs December 3-6. Performances are at 8pm, Thursday to Saturday. Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2pm. Tickets: $15 ($12 seniors, $7 students). Brown University first year and transfer students go free on Thursdays.
Please be aware that this production deals with themes of abuse, self-harm, and institutional violence. The show also contains scenes of graphic violence. Not recommended for young people under the age of 16.
For ticket sales and more information: call (401) 863-2838, or visit the Box Office in the Leeds Theatre Lobby (83 Waterman St, Providence), Tuesday-Friday from 12pm-4pm, or email boxoffice@brown.edu. To book online, visit: brown.edu/tickets. More information on the Brown Theatre performance season available at: brown.edu/theatre.
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If you have any questions or to schedule an interview with the director or the cast, please contact:
Paul Margrave, Marketing Coordinator
(401) 863-2730 / paul_margrave@brown.edu / brown.edu/theatre