McCauley to perform “SUGAR” in NYC Feb. 1-3

The Lumberyard has announced that Prospectus artist Robbie McCauley (More SUGAR) will be performing her acclaimed solo performance work, SUGAR, on February 1, 2 and 3, 2018 at New York Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St., New York, NY. All performances will be at 8 p.m.

You know I suppose to ‘a been dead. Sugar is complicated, like love, full of pleasure and pain. It’s complicated, gives you energy and can eat you up from the inside out.

So begins award-winning theatre artist, Robbie McCauley’s autobiographical solo show about living with “a little bit of sugar” – diabetes, a disease that affects many Americans, and many more African-Americans. Directed by Maureen Shea with music by Chauncey Moore and projections by Mirta Tocci, Sugar looks at everything there is to see about sugar, from slavery to colonialism to American mythologies to racism and diabetes. Against the backdrop of her own remarkable life as an internationally acclaimed performance artist, Sugar is also a chronicle of McCauley’s life as a child in the Jim Crow South and as a young actress in the vibrant theatre scene of 1960’s-1970’s NYC.

Robbie McCauley, recent recipient of the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance, and selected as a 2012 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow, has been an active presence in the American avant-garde theatre for several decades. Also lately, she directed a critically successful Roxbury Repertory Theater production of “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams. She received an OBIE Award and a Bessie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance for her play, Sally’s Rape.

She is widely anthologized including Extreme Exposure, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, and Performance and Cultural Politics, edited respectively by Jo Bonney, Sydne Mahone, and Elin Diamond. One of the early cast members of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway, Robbie went on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country and abroad.

Striving to facilitate dialogues on race between local whites and blacks, she created the Primary Sources series in Mississippi, Boston and Los Angeles produced by The Arts Company. In 1998 her “Buffalo Project” is highlighted as one of “The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments”by The Village Voice, a roster including work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage.

Robbie McCauley is Professor Emerita of Emerson College Department of Performing Arts and the 2014 Monan Professor in Theatre Arts at Boston College.