2020 -21 Season

2020-21 Season / The Voices Project

The voices of immigrants. The voices of women. The voices of black, brown and indigenous individuals. The voices of teachers and students. The voices of our Jewish community. Peppermint Creek is honored to be dedicating our entire 2020/21 season to amplifying these important groups in our community, and to be raising questions about how we've ignored them for so long, how we can learn from them, and how we can celebrate them. Join as us we embark on a season truly unlike any other we've hosted.

We won't be coming together in a traditional theatre building this year. No tickets will be collected this season. Not one season ticket subscription form will be sent out. Instead, we'll gather at drive-in's, around our computers, and around our radios and we'll continue the age-old tradition of theatre: creating a space for important stories that need to be told.

Welcome to our 2020/21 season, where voices will be heard.

"Hear Our Cry"
Adapted for performance by Kathleen Egan & Chad Swan-Badgero
Presented in partnership with Downtown Lansing Inc. and the Lansing Media Project

They were tireless organizers and tenacious fighters. Political geniuses and brave trailblazers. They were Black and Latinx. Indigenous and immigrant and female. Yet their stories and words are not as well-known as they should be. In this original theatrical experience, Peppermint Creek has brought together texts from community suggestions that span the United States’ history and coupled them with literary creations from authors across the county who used the historical texts as inspiration. The event will be presented in a classic drive-in film style where audiences will listen in their own vehicles while the various texts are interpreted by actors on a large movie screen. “Hear Our Cry” passes the mic to voices that have shaped our history, but may be absent from our history books.

"Let Us Breathe"
With voices from Lansing's black and brown community
In partnership with Lansing State Journal's Storytellers

One of the darkest legacies of racism in America is the near-complete removal of black voices from the public discourse. Seeing is not hearing. Only when we stop and listen, when people are heard, do we begin to break down the barriers of inequality and truly work towards a world where Black Lives Matter. Peppermint Creek partners with the Lansing State Journal’s Storytellers project to create an original and personal new production featuring the voices of Lansing’s black and brown community. Join us for this opportunity to stop and listen. "Let Us Breathe" is supported in part by the City of Lansing Arts Projects Grant Program funded by the City of Lansing with administration by the Arts Council of Greater Lansing.

"Holocaust Cantata: Songs from the Camps"
Music by Donald McCollough
Directed by Matthew Eldred

Based on research of original music sung by incarcerated inmates in Holocaust concentration camps, this 40-minute cantata is an emotional, musical journey through one of the bleakest episodes in human history. Working from translations of original Polish materials found in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and starting with just a single line of melody, McCullough has fashioned a haunting choral tribute to the 6 million Jews who were systematically persecuted and murdered as well as to the millions of other individuals the Nazi Party classified as “undesirables,” including Poles, Romanian gypsies, homosexuals, transsexuals, political opponents, religious dissidents, the mentally ill and the physically disabled. What emerges from the insanity of one of history’s worst examples of man’s inhumanity to man is a sense of music’s life-affirming powers.

"Radical Acts of Education"

How might things like empathy, candor, inquiry, wellness, collaboration and imagination reshape school as we know it? How do we allow educators to cope, hope, and promote a profession under constant scrutiny. And how do you attract talent to a profession in a shortage crisis during a pandemic? In a time when good talent is hard to come by it’s important for the truth to be told about the state of education in Michigan and America. "Radical Acts of Education" aims to give those in the educational trenches a platform to speak their truth of their day-to-day lives in this brand new documentary. Find more info here.