UNIVERSES, Whose Theatrical Works Fuse Poetry, Theatre, Jazz, Hip-Hop
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Who Are UNIVERSES? UNIVERSES, whose theatrical works fuse poetry, theatre, jazz, hip-hop, politics, down-home blues and Spanish boleros, came together in 1995 in the open mic scene of New York City. Steven Sapp and Mildred Ruiz-Sapp were performers at the NuYorican Poets Café in Lower Manhattan who blended their talents. William Ruiz (a.k.a. Ninja) auditioned for UNIVERSES in 2004 after graduating from college and became a core member of the ensemble. Over the group’s 20-plus-year career, they have created and/or performed such pieces as The Ride (1998), Blue Suite (a.k.a. Eyewitness Blues) (2004), The Last Word (2005), One Shot in Lotus Position (2006) and others. They presented their pieces at places such as the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and The Public Theater and have performed in Poland, Chile and Colombia. Their first show and one of their better- known works is Slanguage, which premiered in 2001 at the New York Theatre Workshop, directed by Jo Bonney. Since then, they have continued to write and perform nationally acclaimed shows that are socially conscious and rooted in historical narratives and icons. Ameriville, which premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2009, focused on their observations of the people affected by, and their social commentary of, the politics surrounding, hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. For Party People, the group interviewed members of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords to capture the challenges of their activism in the 1960s and the legacies of that work. Party People, an OSF American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle commission, premiered at OSF in 2012 and played at The Public Theater in late 2016. The members of the ensemble continue to be leaders in the theatre world, winning some of the most coveted awards in the field. Sapp won the Theatre Communications Group’s National Directors Award in 2002, and Sapp and Ruiz- Sapp won TCG’s Peter Zeisler Award in 2008 and the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2015. UNIVERSES is currently the Resident Ensemble at OSF. —Martine Kei Green-Rogers, assistant dramaturg Reprinted from OSF’s 2017 Illuminations, a 64-page guide to the season’s plays. For more information on the play, click here. To buy the full Illuminations, click here. Members at the Donor level and above and teachers who bring school groups to OSF receive a free copy of Illuminations. .