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Four Black families who inhabit a brownstone in Harlem variously face up to a crisis that could be imagined from the Trump-drugged, factional politics we are living with today. It mixes live music, dance, civil rights era poetry and contemporary prose, taking inspiration from Ntozake Shange’s acclaimed for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Mecca is Burning aims to illuminate the fragile perspective of contemporary African Americans: a population battered by gentrification, the retraction of equality and human rights, cultural suppression and the actual possibility of civil war with far-right extremists.

Presented by the Negro Ensemble Company, Inc. (NEC), in conjunction with their residency at Penn Live Arts, the play was collaboratively written by Cris Eli Blak, Lisa McCree, Levy Lee Simon and Mona R. Washington under the leadership of Karen Brown, Artistic Director and Executive Producer of NEC, who directs the piece. Over the past year, each of the four playwrights penned a different story about a family living in a Harlem building, each story being independent of the others until a catastrophic event connects them all.