On Entertainment Elocutia Does Pygmalion
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heryl L. West’s plays have been performed on and off-Broadway and on stages in England as well as myriad regional theaters across the U.S. including Seattle Rep, Arena Stage, Old Globe, The Goodman, Indiana Rep, Williamstown Festival, Cleveland Play House, South Coast Rep. Those venues have collectively produced some of her long list of titles that include Shout Sister, Shout!, Akeelah and the Bee, Pullman Porter
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Blues, American Girl Story, and Jar the Floor, among others. West has also written TV and film projects for Disney, Paramount, MTV Films, Showtime, TNT, HBO and CBS and was nominated for a Webby for her scripts for the original web series Diary of a Single Mom. But she also has a special place in her heart for UCSB’s Launch Pad program. That’s where West’s adaptation of The Watsons Go To Birmingham
Playwright Cheryl L. West’s latest creation is Elocutia Does Pygmalion, an African-American adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion
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West talked about the work and how the current racial protests have influenced the writing over the phone from Seattle earlier this week.
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– 1963 was developed via Launch Pad’s summer reading series in 2018 and with a full preview production in January 2019 before making its professional debut at the Chicago Children’s Theatre later that year and playing to sold-out houses at Indiana Repertory Theatre last season. Last June, West also contributed three works to the program’s Alone, Together festival that featured dozens of short works written specifically to be performed during the pandemic-forced relocation of classes and performances on Zoom. Now West has returned once again through the wonders of cyberspace to bat clean-up for this summer’s Launch Pad reading series in which student actors, faculty and community members collaborate with authors to flesh out new works for just a week before offering a reading, this year, of course on Zoom. The play she’s workshopping, Elocutia Does Pygmalion, could barely be more timely, as it’s West’s AfricanAmerican adaptation of the famed George Bernard Shaw play that most folks know better for the 1950s musical conversion called My Fair Lady. Elocutia and professor Herbert Hughes are the sparring partners in the “Black riff” on Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, replete with both comic twists and turns and themes addressing race, class and language-based identity. Launch Pad founder Risa Brainin directs the 4 pm reading of Act 1 on Saturday, August 8, that features Chuck Cooper, who won a Best Actor Tony for The Life in 1997, plus film and stage actor Shaunyce Omar and UCSB Theater Dept. chair Irwin Appel appearing alongside student thespians. Visit https://launchpad.theaterdance.ucsb. edu/reading-series/2020 for details and link.
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