Spread the Word!

Set in 1999, Warren Bodow’s Race Music begins with an act of unequivocal discrimination: Lebron Malek, a young Black man with a passion for classical music, applies for an announcing position at a Midwestern classical radio station and is rejected because of his race.

The production approached this encounter not as the conclusion of the play’s examination of racism, but as its beginning. Through six characters of different races, generations, and cultural backgrounds, Race Music explores the assumptions people carry about one another—and the experiences, histories, and prejudices from which those assumptions emerge.

Produced in 2009, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the production placed the play’s pre-Obama America in conversation with a country proclaiming the arrival of a new, “post-racial” era. Questions surrounding affirmative action, racial profiling, representation, and access remained deeply present. The distance between 1999 and 2009 therefore became part of the investigation: how much had actually changed in American racial and social politics, and how much had merely changed its language?

Classical music became an important part of that inquiry. A cultural form often associated with tradition, refinement, and a predominantly white establishment becomes the territory over which questions of belonging are contested: who is presumed to belong in this world, who is allowed to represent it, and who gets to decide?

The production resisted reducing its characters to positions in an argument. Their identities are shaped by race but not contained by it; each carries biases and contradictions alongside the experiences that have formed them. Race Music ultimately became an exploration of prejudice not as something belonging exclusively to villains or to the past, but as something human beings inherit, rationalize, challenge—and have the capacity to change.

"Strong ensemble work directed by Victor Lirio ... RACE MUSIC'S examination of race’s continued, if shifting, influence in America adds perspective to that national conversation that just doesn’t seem to end."
- Daniel M. Gold, New York Times Critic's Pick

"Directed by Victor Lirio with a tough mind and sensitivity ... Bodow's music reaches its crescendoing coda ... A POLISHED ENSEMBLE!" - Theatermania

"Under the unblinking direction of Victor Lirio, this drama explores how racism insidiously infiltrates our culture and contaminates our private and personal lives ... SOLID ACTING ENSEMBLE." - Theatrescene.net