Letters From Freedom Summer, at UMKC Theatre, takes on an infamous Mississippi season

As part of KC Repertory Theatre’s OriginKC: New Works Festival, UMKC Theatre presents a workshop production of Letters From Freedom Summer, directed by Ricardo Khan (a co-writer with Sibusiso Mambo and Denise Nicholas). 

Khan’s previous productions at UMKC Theatre include Kansas City Swing, about baseball, jazz and racial integration in 1940s KC, and Freedom Rider (a collaboration with playwrights Nathan Louis Jackson, Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, Murray Horwitz and Nikkole Salter), about civil rights workers who confronted danger while integrating interstate buses in the Deep South in 1961.

Letters from Freedom Summer follows the work and lives of college students who joined the dangerous — even life-threatening — fight for voting rights in 1964 Mississippi. In a press release, Khan says this play “is a story of courage, love, spirit and conviction during the years of the civil rights movement in this country.” In an interview with The Pitch in 2013, Khan said, “I try to make my work always educational on some level because I believe so passionately in the need to learn more about ourselves and each other…. But educating is not the driving force. The driving force is to tell a story.”

Letters From Freedom Summer

May 4-13 at Spencer Theatre, Olson PAC, 4949 Cherry, 816-235-6222, tickets.cto.umkc.edu