REDWOOD educational materials
Explore more from the world of Brittany K. Allen’s REDWOOD with articles, interviews, videos, and more below.
VIDEO INTERVIEWS WITH JUNGLE COHORT
Throughout our show's run, our artistic cohort will be interviewing our REDWOOD artists, giving audiences a special look at the creation of this production.
Artistic cohort member JuCoby Johnson interviews REDWOOD director H. Adam Harris.
Jungle artistic cohort member Angela Timberman interviews REDWOOD Head of Wardrobe Amber Brown.
Jungle artistic cohort member James Rodríguez interviews REDWOOD playwright Brittany K. Allen.
Jungle artistic cohort member Sequoia Hauck interviews lobby installation artist Bayou Bay.
THE DRAMATURGICAL RESEARCH CORNER
BASED ON RESEARCH FROM REDWOOD DRAMATURG MORGAN HOLMES
SYMBOLISM OF THE REDWOOD
"...a major goal of the play is to acknowledge the hugeness of any family’s tree and show how we are all of us in America tangled up in one another. And at the play’s end — spoiler alert — I enlisted the chorus as Meg and Drew’s intertwined ancestors because I wanted to show in a brief burst how diverse these stories are once you really go digging.
Everyone in America, I'll assert, was affected by slavery. And I wanted to show a gamut of those uniquely affected lives, from Hattie to Tatum to Napoleon to the matriarch Alameda."
-EXCERPTED FROM "OUR TANGLED ROOTS: AN INTERVIEW WITH REDWOOD PLAYWRIGHT AND PERFORMER BRITTANY K. ALLEN" PORTLAND CENTER STAGE AT THE ARMORY REDWOOD PROGRAM
Read more from the interview
SKIN DOESN'T FORGET: BIOLOGICAL TRAUMA INHERITANCE & PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS
Social scientists are using what we know about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to try to create a framework to address inherited trauma between generations and on a large scale (such as from the Holocaust or American slavery). You may have heard these frameworks called trans-/multi-/intergenerational trauma, historical trauma or collective trauma. Social scientists argue trauma is "inherited" through socialization and observation, where an adult normalizes a trauma response with no coping mechanism to a child. Through large-scale repetition, these behaviors can even become an intracultural phenomenon, like a superstition.
INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND REPRESENTATION
As of 2015, 15 - 17 % of newlyweds, or 1 in 6, are racially intermarried in the US. In the Minneapolis/ St Paul area, it's about 15 % of newlyweds. Compare this to 1967 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Loving v. Virginia, only 3 % of newlyweds nationally were intermarried.
As interrelationships and marriages continue to grow in the US, their representation in media and on stage rises to meet the change.
FROM THE PRESS
THE WASHINGTON POST:
An old Virginia plantation, a new owner and a family legacy unveiled
There was so much Fredrick Miller didn’t know about the handsome house here on Riceville Road.
He grew up just a half-mile away and rode past it on his school bus every day. It was hard to miss. The home’s Gothic revival gables, six chimneys, diamond-paned windows and sweeping lawn were as distinctive a sight as was to be seen in this rural southern Virginia community. But Miller, 56, an Air Force veteran who now lives in California, didn’t give it much thought. He didn’t know it had once been a plantation or that 58 people had once been enslaved there. He never considered that its past had anything to do with him.
Two years ago, when his sister called to say the estate was for sale, he jumped on it. He’d been looking, pulled home to the place he left at 18. His roots were deep in this part of Pittsylvania County, and he wanted a place where his vast extended family, many of whom still live nearby, could gather…
STAR TRIBUNE:
REDWOOD DIGS INTO A COUPLE’S TWINED ROOTS, HISTORY
Through interviews with the playwright, director and the artistic director, Star Tribune's Rohan Preston explores deeper into the making of this incredible production and how the Jungle has waited almost two years to tell this story.
Minnesota Playlist:
Comedy wrapped around the fundamentally unfunny
Explore more behind the inspiration of REDWOOD with this interview between playwright Brittany K. Allen and Minnesota Playlist.