On December 5 at 8 p.m. and December 6 at 2 and 8 p.m., Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts will present When Pages Breathe: American Black/Out, a lecture-performance that presents scenes and monologues ranging from the rich historical lineage of Black American theater to a live resistance-driven narrative lecture on culture and power.
The event, at the Wallace Theatre in the Lewis Arts complex, honors playwrights and poets who have resisted authoritarian narrative capture over the last century. It archives suppressed histories and invites audiences to resist erasure through community dialogue and organizing. The work is presented and performed by Anya Pearson, a 2021-22 Princeton Hodder Fellow, Drama Desk winner Chesney Snow, Lecturer in Theater for the Program in Theater and Music Theater; and features senior Destine Harrison-Williams. The lecture and performance are co-directed by Pearson and Snow and are in collaboration with Princeton’s Black Theater Collective.
A talkback and a panel discussion with scholars, professors, alumni, and leading figures in American theater today follow performances, which are co-sponsored by Princeton’s Humanities Council. Admission is free.
When Pages Breathe is a collaborative series between Princeton University Library’s Special Collections and the Program in Theater and Music Theater, created and curated by Snow. Pearson and Snow met earlier this fall with Jennifer Garcon, librarian for Modern and Contemporary Special Collections at the library, to review the University’s related archives. The series is dedicated to the late William Noel, the John T. Maltsberger III ’55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections. This year’s series is presented in collaboration with Princeton’s Black Theater Collective.
Snow is a Drama Desk Award-winning interdisciplinary artist who works as a performer, composer, lyricist, sound designer, and teaching artist. His recent collaborations include Skeleton Crew on Broadway, Walks of Life at La Jolla Playhouse, Upstream at Syracuse Stage, which he wrote and starred in, as well as Soil Beneath off-Broadway at Primary Stages, and Crowns and Princeton and Slavery Plays at McCarter Theatre, among others.
Pearson is an award-winning playwright, poet, screenwriter, actress, and activist. A 2021-22 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, she was a finalist for Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program (2023), for the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting at Brown University (2020), and the National Black Theatre’s Playwriting Residency (2019). She is a 2025 Advance Gender Equity (AGE) in the Arts Legacy Playwright. Her plays include The Measure of Innocence, Made to Dance in Burning Buildings, The Killing Fields, Without a Formal Declaration of War, and Butterflies Eat Decay.
Visit arts.princeton.edu for more information.