LAFPI

The Matrix Theatre Company’s award-winning production of Scraps by Geraldine Inoa is now available for viewing on the company’s Youtube page.

A provocative mash up of poetry, realism and expressionism, Scraps boldly chronicles how the family and friends of a black teenager shot by a white police officer struggle to cope in the aftermath.

Set in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, three months after the fatal shooting, this daring new play ran for two-and-a-half months at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles, receiving accolades including three Ovation and five Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award nominations and a “Critic’s Choice” review from Charles McNulty at the Los Angeles Times.

Scraps was directed by 2019 Obie Award winner Stevie Walker-Webb; the cast includes Stan Mayer, Tyrin Niles, Ashlee Olivia, Damon Rutledge, Ahkei Togun and Denise Yolén. Scenic design was by John Iacovelli; lighting design by Brian Gale and Zo Haynes; sound design by Jeff Gardner; costume design by Wendell C. Carmichael; props design by David Saewert; and casting by Jami Rudofsky. The production stage manager was Rita Cofield, and Gabrieal Griego associate produced for Joseph Stern and The Matrix Theatre Company.

In 2009, following more than three decades of producing multiple award-winning work for the stage, Matrix Theatre Company founder/artistic director Stern resolved to redirect the company’s focus to the exploration of race issues in contemporary society. Since then, the Matrix has offered up critically acclaimed productions of Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly, set in the Martha’s Vineyard summer home of an upper middle class African American family; Neighbors, the highly provocative study of the history of racism in America by then-unknown playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who has since gone on to win two Obie awards and a MacArthur “genius” grant; a non-traditional. multi-culturally cast production of all My Sons by Arthur Miller; the West Coast premiere of We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 by Jackie Sibblies Drury, who went on to receive the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; and the Los Angeles premiere of The Mountaintop by Katori Hall, in an acclaimed production directed by Roger Guenveur Smith.

To read the Los Angeles Times article “How Joe Stern made Hollywood’s Matrix Theater dramatically diverse,” go to https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2019-09-25/how-joe-stern-made-hollywoods-matrix-theater-dramatically-diverse.

Scraps can be viewed on the Matrix Theatre Company’s Youtube page at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdXs4A7NBw&feature=youtu.be