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Everyone has faced challenges during the pandemic, but two play readings presented last weekend by Common Ground Theatre showed how cultural traditions have made it especially hard for many in the Black community to cope.
Playwright A.D. Brown, whose semi-autobiographical play “Pruning Ivy” was presented during the Zoom event on Jan. 30, said members of the Black community often look down on therapy and counseling because they see it as a sign of weakness.
“We’re prideful people,” Brown said. “We don’t want our family’s business in the street. We stuff our stuff. We push it down and just move forward without dealing with certain things.”
Francine DeWitt-Haynes can’t be sure, but she suspects that her father was inspired to co-create what is now known as Common Ground Theatre after attending a play as a student at Columbia University in New York City. When the late Rufus DeWitt moved his family from Mobile, Ala., to San Diego, there wasn’t an organized theater company for Black San Diegans, so he and a friend started the Southeast Community Theatre in 1963, which changed its name to Common Ground Theatre in 2003.
“Since my father was a YMCA director, his focus was on the youth,” DeWitt-Haynes says. “(He) founded a theater that included all ages, bringing outstanding plays to the southeastern San Diego community and to the city of San Diego. I am very proud of my father’s accomplishment” in creating Common Ground Theatre, one of the longest-running and respected Black theater companies in the country, she says.
Cygnet Theatre will continue its Bill and Judy Garrett Finish Line Commission new play festival next month with the opening of Aurin Squire’s “Run/Fire,” in a streaming production that will play Feb. 8 through 14.
Now in its fifth year under the sponsorship of longtime Cygnet donors Bill and Judy Garrett, the new play series usually includes forums, workshops and performances that are open to the public. This is the first time it is being produced virtually.
Each year, three plays are selected for development. One of the plays developed at the 2019 Finish Line festival, Herbert Siguenza’s “Bad Hombres/Good Wives,” went on to receive its world premiere later that year at San Diego Repertory Theatre.