The VORTEX Saturday Reading Series is proud to present

UNDERGROUND
by Lisa B. Thompson
Starring Zell Miller III and Marc Pouhe
Directed by Rudy Ramirez

Kyle and Mason were collegiate revolutionaries, two young men willing to put everything on the line for black liberation. More than two decades later, a new revolutionary movement is fighting fire with fire in the name of black lives, and the two men, now successful professionals, have come back together to reminisce, play chess, debate, strategize and open up a very important briefcase. The VORTEX is proud to bring together Zell Miller III and Marc Pouhé, two living legends of the Austin theatre scene, to bring to life Lisa B. Thompson's powerful drama that asks what you must do--and how far you must go--in the name of your people. 

Lisa B. Thompson is an Austin-based theatre artist and scholar whose critically acclaimed plays and innovative scholarship explore issues of race, class, sexuality and gender. Her plays have been performed across the US and Canada and have been produced and/or developed by New Professional Theatre, Brava Theater Center, Theatre Rhinoceros, New African Grove Theatre Company, Black Spectrum Theatre, Company of Angels Theater, FronteraFest, the Actors Warehouse, The One-Minute Play Festival, ScriptsWorks and the National Black Theatre Festival. Thompson’s off-Broadway two-woman show, Single Black Female (Samuel French, 2012, a nominee for the 2004 LA Weekly Theatre Award for best comedy, uses rapid-fire comic vignettes to examine the love lives of thirty-something African American middle class women.

Other full-length plays include the one-woman show Dreadtime Stories: One Sista’s Hair; Monroe; The Mamalogues; and Underground; short plays including I Don’t Want to Be, Black Lives Matter: Three Words, Legacy, Second Grade, Night. Her satirical comedy Mother’s Day, the first installment of her Afro-futurist trilogy of short plays, was featured in the 2013 anthology show, Black Women: State of The Union and won Best of Fest at FronteraFest 2013. Watch, the second installment in her Afro-futurist trilogy, Watch, premiered in Carry On, the Scriptworks Out of Ink Festival 2016.

Thompson is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and affiliate faculty in the departments of English, Women and Gender Studies and Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her BA in English and MA in African American Studies from UCLA and her Ph.D. from Stanford University Program in Modern Thought and Literature.

The centerpiece of her scholarship is her first book, Beyond The Black Lady: Sexuality And The New African American Middle Class (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Her creative work has been published in Contemporary Plays by African American Women: Ten Complete Works (University of Illinois Press, 2015) and Catch The Fire: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Riverhead Books, 1998). Thompson is currently completing “Black Millennial Stages: Reimagining History, Memory and Identity,” a study about the ways contemporary African American playwrights engage with notions of history.