Grandmother/Bathtub

by Brian Dang '26 MFA
directed by Talley Murphy '23 PHD

Saturday, May 4: 2:00 PM
Sunday, May 5: 11:00 AM

Tickets will be available online beginning
at 9AM the morning of each performance. 

Ashamu Dance Studio
83 Waterman Street
Providence RI 02912

Grandmother won’t leave the tub, even though it’s on a fault-line ready to blow. Nat comes home sometimes to give her a bath and keeps vowing to leave for good. They don’t speak the same language but they try to reconcile every death and every word. The world keeps splitting open. They keep trying.

Brian Dang (they/them) is a Vietnamese/Chinese poet/playwright based in Seattle, WA & Providence, RI. Brian is a proud resident playwright at Parley (Seattle), a 2021 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and 2023 Lambda Fellow. Their work interrogates and explodes the presence of structures, systems, cycles, and myths in the domestic. Their plays are a mixture of devised and scripted narratives that tend to the present moment of the characters, exploring what it means to be “overdetermined by history” (Billy-Ray Belcourt). Their plays include This time (Undermain Fund for New Work ‘22, O’Neill Finalist ‘22, Many Voices Fellowship Semi-Finalist ‘22) and a white haunting (Princess Grace Fellowship Finalist ‘21, MAP Theatre). For Brian, writing is an act of envisioning an eventual communing, an opportunity to freeze time as we know it, and a reaching for joy. They are an MFA candidate at Brown. Website: brianeatswords.com

Talley Murphy is a stage director, video artist, and performance studies scholar. They have directed new and classical works for the stage and in non-traditional spaces in NY, DC, Providence, in rural New England, and online; across disciplines, Talley’s work emphasizes devised movement and multimedia design. At Fullscreen Blackbox, Talley has created digital performances to imagine our non/virtual futures as part of partnerships with NY-area housing and immigration organizations. Talley has a PhD from Brown in Theatre and Performance Studies. talleymurphy.com / fullscreenblackbox.com