ReClaim May: “How It’s Gon’ Be” by JuCoby Johnson

How It’s Gon’ Be

A new play by JuCoby Johnson

Read by:

Charla Marie Bailey, Malik Ceesay, Kiara Jackson, Ashe Jafaaru, Darrick Mosley, Mikell Sapp, James Austin Williams

Free admission. Free snacks. Free parking available across the street in the Lake Country School lot.

What’s the play about?
Parents make all kinds of hard trade-offs while raising their children. When you’re a young black man growing up near the Florida-Georgia line, and the child of an active-duty serviceman, your parents are faced with a very specific set of trade-offs. How do you, as a young person, see and understand those choices? How do you as a parent keep your children safe, equip them to live successfully in our conflicted world, and build an emotionally close relationship? JuCoby Johnson has written a heartfelt, funny, and incisive memory play, illuminating the roles of parent and child, interrogating his own teenage choices and friendships, and deconstructing whether the compromises his parents and family made were worth it. He celebrates the community that raised him, and all of the ways in which it shaped him for the better, while he challenges familiar assumptions and tropes, questioning whether there might be other ways to build a family and community.

CFPA Mpls’s ReClaim series is an assembly space to connect all kinds of audiences, artists, experiences, and stories. Our events explore the vitality of American identity, and the ways in which creative works reflect our lived experience (or not). Our events grapple with the stories we hear and see, the stories we make and tell, and the ways in which we are (or are not) changed by creative ​representations of our experiences. We assemble for lively questions, dynamic conversation, and to encourage new ways of understanding each other’s lives.

CFPA Mpls produces art events on the Third Saturday of every month. All events are free and open to the public.

We support artists who engage fiercely with the complex and contradictory nature of the human experience. We support audiences who yearn for greater personal engagement between works of art and the daily life of our community. With a focus on artists that reckon with social justice on a human scale, the post-presentation discussions are facilitated by skilled leaders in the creation of art and the seeking of justice.

For more information on the artists and on the series, visit www.cfpampls.com and click on “ReClaim Series.”

Please RSVP on our Facebook page!