Festival of Short Plays Inspired by Trayvon Martin Case

The New Black Fest, which supports innovative plays by and about black people, has brought together seven playwrights to create six plays about race and privilege in the United States in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case.

The Alliance Theater in Atlanta, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Goodman Theater in Chicago,  Center Stage in Baltimore, the Woolly Mammoth in Washington, D.C. and the National Black Theater in New York are among those that have agreed to produce the work, said Keith Josef Adkins, a co-founder and the artistic director of New Black Fest.

“The playwrights are Latino, white, Middle Eastern, Asian-American and black,” Mr. Adkins said Monday in announcing the project. It is called “Facing Our Truth: Ten-Minute Plays on Trayvon, Race and Privilege.” It was inspired, he said, by the debates and nationwide protests that greeted George Zimmerman’s July 13 acquittal in the killing of Mr. Martin, a unarmed black teenager.  Mr. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., claimed that he killed Mr. Martin, 17, in self-defense.

“The playwrights said ‘yes’ immediately and the theaters said ‘yes’ immediately,” Mr. Adkins said. Each theater will hire its own actors and director, he said, and have creative control of the plays, written by emerging and mid-career playwrights. “I certainly feel like while we have conversations around race and privilege in black communities, I wanted the conversations to be integrated,” said Mr. Adkins, who is also a playwright.

The playwrights signed on for the project will have completed their work in early September, Mr. Adkins said. They  are Dominique Morisseau (“Detroit ’67”); Winter Miller (“The Penetration Project”); Dan O’Brien (“The Body of An American”) in a collaboration with the musician Quetzal Flores; Marcus Gardley (“Every Tongue Confess”); Mona Mansour and Tala Manassah (co-authors of “After”); and A. Rey Pamatmat ( “Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them”).