I Knew King When He Was Nobody at University of Alabama

A stage-reading of Allston James' drama "I Knew King When He Was Nobody" will open the New Voices Theatre Festival at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa on August 3 at 7:30 pm. Set in a Midtown Manhattan office building, a young Black execurtive and a white CEO await uncertain rescue after a sructural failure entraps them, leading the two men into a complex and tortuous examination of their mutual suspicions and fears as they discover that their family histories intersected a half-century earlier in the Deep South, when the home of a young Black minister's family was bombed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Originally written as a commission award for New York's Abingdon Theatre Company, the play was long-listed for the 2021 Kenneth Branagh New Drama Award. James' drama was one of two scripts  that Alabama's New Voices Theatre Festival selected from a field of 600 plays. 

"I Knew King When He Was Nobody" is directed by Benny Lee Harris Lumpkins Jr. and festures LaBorne Brown, Nathan Kiliany, Jackson White, and Donny Andrade. The performance will be at 7:30 pm at the Allen Bales Theatre at the University of Alabama, Saturday, August 3. Admission is free.