“Ubuntu Holiday” Streaming at Pittsburgh Playwrights (Sun., 12/13/20)

It’s an ‘Ubuntu Holiday’ for the people in Kim El’s play. Actors shown here are (L to R) Sundiata Rice, Melessie Clark, LaMar Darnell Fields, and Nia Washington. (photo: Mark Clayton Southers)

There is more than one way to celebrate the year-end holidays, as Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company aptly demonstrates. PPTCo is streaming a free-on-demand video of its 2014 seasonal production, Kim El’s Ubuntu Holiday. “Ubuntu” is a word used, and a philosophy embraced, by many people in southern Africa. The term has been variously translated as “kindness,” “goodness,” or the like; more broadly it represents the belief that we can only be fully human through loving relations with others. In the seriocomic Ubuntu Holiday we meet two contemporary African-American families—one doing Christmas in the usual U.S. mainstream way and one that’s celebrating Kwanzaa instead. The woman from family A doesn’t get the Kwanzaa idea, and objects rather disruptively, but in the end, ubuntu carries the day. Ubuntu Holiday was directed by Mils James, with a cast featuring Paris Nakena Crosby, Nadia Locust, Nia Washington, Sundiata Rice, Melessie Clark, Lamar Darnell Fields, and Scott Nanji. It’s available online through January 3. (M.V.) 

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