Race Card NYC Reviews and Tickets

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About the Show

Playwright/performer Karma Mayet shares stories of America’s tortured relationship to race – both personal and historical – set within the frame of a game of Bid Whist with the audience.

With a winning card guiding the choice of story, on any given night she may summon her own experiences moving from Chicago to an all-white town in Illinois, widening to passed-down tales of the Great Migration and the Pullman Porters, smack up against her own current experiences navigating New York microagressions. In this participatory piece, Mayet creates a wonderland of playful intellect, inhabited by humor that bites and characters that speak in twisted tongues. 'Race Card' unpacks the musty traveling papers stuffed into the 21st century's history bags, and rifles through the audience’s very own drawers as well, calling on them to join the fray of stage play with both cued and improvised live-ness at every turn.

Critic Reviews (2)

“A provocative, not-quite-solo performance that is part storytelling, part game of bid whist...Those stories will resonate with or implicate us...Either way, we have a stake in the ugliness she outlines, and thus in the show…Powerful…’Race Card’ isn’t neat, and it isn’t meant to be...The nation’s wounds are old and deep, ‘Race Card’ makes plain, and Americans are still carrying the scars.”
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"The stories contained on these stacks of cards are the reason to be here...The narratives land because they are so devastatingly ordinary...The invitation to share memories is the most successful of Mayet’s forays into audience participation, others of which come across as less carefully considered...Structure could be tightened, and its audience communications clarified, without sacrificing its deliberate informality. This would only highlight Mayet’s stories."
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Trailer

Creative team