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One-Man Play Explores James Baldwin, Black Male Vulnerability

June 9, 2021
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Berkeley alum and artist Harmony Holiday’s one-man play, God’s Suicide, takes Black male vulnerability as its central subject. Adapted from an essay by the artist and constructed around the rarely acknowledged five suicide attempts of writer and public intellectual James Baldwin, this deeply personal work examines the interplay between creative and destructive forces in societies infected with white supremacy. In this special presentation hosted by the Hammer Museum at UCLA, actor Larry Powell portrays Baldwin.

The daughter of Northern Soul singer Jimmy Holiday, Harmony ’04 holds a BA in rhetoric from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Columbia University and taught for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. Her published works include Negro League Baseball, Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues, and Hollywood Forever. Her recently published M a a f A takes its title from the Swahili word for catastrophe or holocaust, and is an exploration of reparations and the body.

Details:

God’s Suicide
June 24, 7 p.m. PT
Free with RSVP for the first 1,000 viewers / available on recording afterward via the Hammer Channel
Tickets: https://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2021/gods-suicide-harmony-holiday 

Watch Harmony Holiday read during Berkeley’s Lunch Poems 2015 series.