Set in the 1970s, in a rural, coastal, southern town, In The Name Of The Mother Tree is a theatrical ceremony illuminating the journey for climate reparations through an intersectional praxis of womanist metaphysics, world-making, and root work. Helmed by Ebony Noelle Golden and inspired by the writing and scholarship of Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, In The Name of the Mother Tree begins on the eve of the Water Days, as a town is ravished by a cataclysmic rupture. Haunted by recurring nightmares of spiritual warfare, fire-floods, drought, river haints, and vanishing tree women, we meet these strange and magical people on the precipice of a new paradigm or an untimely demise. Soon we learn that sisters, Vetiver and Teeny, hold the fate of future generations in their hands. Together, they mourn their mother's disappearance, struggle with the shadowy legacy she left them to decipher, resuscitate their ancestors’ rituals, and restore the town to the brilliant, bioluminescent, biome of Black thriving it once was.
Land Acknowledgement: I live and work on the island of Manahatta (Manhattan), the land of the Munsee Lenape people.
