It is the autumn of 2014. The police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has catapulted the #BlackLivesMatter movement into national prominence. As grass-roots activists organize around state-sanctioned violence and anti-black racism, black college students across the country begin a new generation of agitation, connecting their own campus-based concerns with wider manifestations of racism.
In this new multi-racial play, a black student has been shot and killed by police just outside the Chicago lakefront campus of DuSable University. The tragedy moves Trane Joplin, a 20-year-old junior, to find his voice and identity as part of the ensuing student protests, led by a fresh generation of students of color. Frustrated by negotiations with a cautious university administration, Trane takes bold action to dramatize the cause. His efforts anger and worry his mother, Raphaella Joplin, a prominent university professor who has sought to shelter him from the harsher realities of racism and who
resents his relationship with Aya Monroe, a first-generation college student and protest leader attuned to gender as well as racial justice. #WOKE’s compelling array of voices animates live social and psychic stakes in new ways for audiences.
While dramatizing the horror of police murders of black men, the play examines the searing effects of racism and violence on a diverse circle of friends, colleagues and family members, while it freshly explores institutional responsibility and educational ethics. With poignancy, #WOKE raises the question: which black lives matter?
