About the Play:

Fairview has become a favourite of acting teachers for female/female scenes and female/male scenes.

Fairview is a full-length drama by Jackie Sibblies Drury. It's Grandma's birthday and an African-American family called the Frasiers have gathered to celebrate. Beverly just wants everything to run smoothly, but Tyrone has missed his flight, Keisha is freaking out about college and Grandma has locked herself in the bathroom. But something isn't right. Who is watching them? Fairview is an interrogation of our subtly destructive preconceptions.

Fairview is about the Frasier family, who is gearing up for Grandma's birthday. Beverly is holding onto her sanity by a thread to make sure this party is perfect, but everything seems doomed to go awry – the silverware is all wrong, the radio is on the fritz, and the rest of the family can't be bothered to lift a hand to help. Her sister Jasmine is drinking, her husband Dayton can't seem to listen, her brother Tyrone might not show up at all, her daughter is a teenager, and maybe nothing is what it seems in the first place…! Fairview begins as an easygoing comedy about a middle-class black family gathering for a birthday dinner and ends somewhere else entirely. A play about race, though not only about race, it explores what it feels like to be living under surveillance and it looks at who does and who does not get to control the narrative of their own lives.

Fairview premiered in 2018 with sold-out rolling runs first at Soho Rep. and then at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize honouring the best English-language women writers worldwide. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has become a popular choice for school and community theatre productions.

Cast: 5 female, 3 male

What people say:

"…dazzling and ruthless…one of the most exquisitely and systematically arranged ambushes of an unsuspecting audience in years…Fairview is a series of perspective-altering surprises, and they keep coming at you even when you think [Drury] must surely have emptied [her] bag of tricks…a glorious, scary reminder of the unmatched power of live theater to rattle, roil and shake us wide awake." — New York Times

"…[an] outstanding, frustrating, hilarious, and sui generis play…From moment to moment, Drury disturbed and frustrated and entertained us and made us wonder what we were all doing in that room, watching black actors perform being human." — New Yorker

"…[a] vehement, searching, fourth-wall-demolishing [play]…under a playful surface, [Fairview] is strenuous and scalpel-sharp and working its way through deep rage…[it's] rare and intimidating, unresolved and raw. It left me with the blood pounding in my ears…." — New York Magazine

About the Playwright:

Jackie Sibblies Drury is a Brooklyn-based African American playwright. She is a graduate of Brown's MFA playwriting program, where she received a Weston Award as well as the David Wickham Prize in Playwriting. Her critically acclaimed play Fairview won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.