Nikkole was one of 90 US playwrights across the nation to contribute to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival/One-Minute Play Festival's collaboration, Every 28 Hours Plays, a national partnership focused on building awareness of the widely shared and contested statistic that a Black person is killed by the police every 28 hours in the United States. The Every 28 Hours Plays consist of one-minute plays inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement of which Nikkole's 3-minute play UNKNOWN THOUSANDS serves as the finale. Some playwright contributors include: Richard Montoya, Ralph Remington, Dominique Morriseau, Liza Jesse Peterson, Stew, Rickerby Hinds, Robert Schenkkan, Aurin Squire, Idris Goodwin, Jim McManus, Shishir Kurup, Robert Alexander, Zakiyyah Alexander, Larissa Fasthorse, Tavia Nyongo, Marshall Jones, David Henry Hwang, and Lynn Nottage. Collaborating theatres include Crossroads Theatre Company, The Black Rep, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, That Uppity Theatre Company, St. Louis Rep Theater, Salt House Collective, Trinity Repertory Company, The Team, Know Theatre, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Voices United, Sojourn Theater, Looking Glass Theater, Urban Theater Movement, Fishtank Performance Studio, Cleveland Public Theater, Guthrie Theater, ACT and The National Black Theater.
Created under the leadership of Claudia Alick (OSF’s associate producer, community) and Dominic D’Andrea (producing artistic director, The One-Minute Play Festival), in association with local St. Louis theater maker and producer Jacqueline Thompson (assistant professor of acting and directing, University of Missouri-St. Louis), the first phase of the project included community meetings, collaborative writing sessions and free staged readings of the plays at two locations on Oct. 24th: the Dellwood Recreation Center in Ferguson, Missouri at 2:00 p.m., and the Kranzberg Arts Center in St. Louis at 8:00 p.m. The Every 28 Hours Plays will be produced by theatres around the country from Oct. 2015 to Oct. 2016. For information on when a reading of the Every 28 Hours Plays is coming to your town, visit their Facebook page for posted events. Below are blog entries chronicling Nikkole's thoughts on the movement, as it relates to her participation in the Every 28 Hours Plays.
Apr 12, 2016
E28H @ The Kennedy Center
On April 12th at 6pm, The Kennedy Center, as part of its American College Theater Festival on the Millennium Stage, presents a raw, script-in-hand preview of the Every 28 Hours Plays. This collection of new plays, developed by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the One Minute Play Festival, created and curated by artists and theatres across the nation, asks us to examine the realities of race relations in America. Livestream can be viewed here: http://www.kennedy-center.org/video/upcoming
Oct 28, 2015
12:00 PM
Free, but reservation required.
Oct 26, 2015
7PM
Trinity Reperatory Theatre
Free and open to the public.
3 minutes. 10+ actors. A commission of the EVERY 28 HOURS PLAYS, a collection of 90 one-minute plays on the epidemic of police murders of Black people in the US. The piece serves as the finale.
San Francisco Chronicle - Feature
By Lily Janiak
October 24, 2016
The last play of the 36 very short (often just a minute long) pieces that made up the evening’s bill on Oct. 22, Nikkole Salter’s “Unknown Thousands,” isn’t the kind of work that makes you want to leap to your feet to cheer...What makes Salter’s “Unknown Thousands” stand out among the “Every 28 Hours” plays isn’t just that FaultLine gives it prime real estate, as the concluding piece of the evening; it’s also the way the script crystallizes what the show and the Black Lives movement as a whole are all about...In the way the piece derives its power from naming the forgotten, witnessing “Unknown Thousands” is like visiting the Vietnam War Memorial. If that monument responds to both the government’s ineptitude in a particular war and the dehumanization inherent in all wars, Salter’s script offers a corrective, albeit a small one, to the dehumanization in both recent police brutalities and in any act of racism."
