Playing in the Loreto Theatre at
The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture
10 Bleecker Street in New York City.
Previews begin May 30th 2018
Little Rock is the true story of The Little Rock Nine — the first blacks to volunteer to integrate Little Rock Central High School, the formerly segregated all-white public school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.
They were average teenagers with above-average grades and varied interests — track star, basketball star, jazz impresario, aspiring theater actress, Shakespearean, aspiring attorney, teacher and resident comedian. They wanted access to the best facilities, best books and best teaching instruction that their capitol city offered. They would agree to sacrifice sports, music, drama club and any other extracurricular activities that would lend itself to unnecessary race-mixing, in order to do so.
Their quest might have been otherwise unremarkable and gone unnoticed — had they not been in the Jim Crow South with a defiant Governor willing to violate federal law (Brown vs Board of Education) to integrate schools.
The staged cast of this real-life drama journeys back to 1957 to unveil those intimate, never-revealed, moments between The Nine and their supporting and opposing real-life cast — parents, civil rights leaders, mayor, school board, segregationists, bullies, administrators, teachers, community activists, famous athletes and entertainers, prominent local businessmen, television and newspaper reporters, international heads of state.
Told in memory, Little Rock artfully hurtles between past and present, challenge and triumph, hate and hope. It examines the unintended efforts of nine brave American teenagers forever thrust onto the national stage, unwittingly becoming agents of social change in the process — igniting the passions of a nation in the early dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, forever changing the face of education in America and giving hope to millions around the world in the generations to follow.
They never planned to be change agents.
They didn’t consider themselves heroes.
They just wanted to go to school.