Dallas-based playwright Erin Malone Hunter’s new play, set in a Black-owned bookstore in Louisiana in the 1990s, is a celebration of “first” queer love, the human spirit, bibliophiles and community. Soul Rep Theatre opens the premiere of the play on Thursday, Oct. 12.
Soul Rep Theatre follows up its riveting season opener — a co-production with Echo Theatre of Tori Sampson’s Cadillac Crew —with the long-awaited world premiere of the newly-commissioned play, What Fits Inside a Human Heart.
Written by prolific up-and-coming playwright Erin Malone Turner of Dallas through a transformative TACA New Works grant and billed as a “first” queer love story, this inspiring work is set in a Black-owned bookstore in 1990s-era Louisiana. It is a tribute to first loves, to bibliophiles, to the Black community and to the human spirit.
The production is co-directed by Dee Hunter-Smith, Soul Rep’s co-associate artistic director of theater, and her wife La-Hunter Smith. It will run Oct. 12-22 at Theater Too, located in the basement of Theatre Three, 2688 Laclede Street in the Quadrangle. Tickets are available online at SoulRep.org, ranging from $20-$30. Group tickets are also available.
Soul Rep’s co-founder and Artistic Director Guinea Bennett-Price said, “We are thrilled to have the confidence and generous support of TACA in commissioning and developing this important new work written by a playwright we believe will be known nationally in years to come. This amount of investment and resource is a first for Soul Rep and builds upon our legacy and commitment of nurturing, celebrating, and providing a platform for women writers and writers of color.
“What Fits Inside a Human Heart is an important new play with a clear voice and point of view regarding queerness, gentrification and community building in Black communities,” Bennett-Price added.
Turner has dedicated the play to “anyone falling in love or trying not to, for those hiding from the world or stepping out into it, for people who refuse to be subdued — for the queers of the South and the riot of their resilience and light. For the buoyant people of Louisiana who decline to drown.”
Soul Rep’s current season is sponsored in part by generous support from TACA, City of Dallas Office of Art and Culture, Moody Fund for the Arts and an Anonymous Friend. The theater’s mission is to provide quality, transformative Black theater, and its vision is to shift the paradigm of how the Black experience is valued.
— Tammye Nash
