Events Calendar

Play Reading: Corner Wars
Monday, March 22, 6:00 pm

This lecture is part of a public programming series centered around the new photography exhibition Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction and Poverty in Urban America. In Righteous Dopefiend, anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg document the daily lives of homeless drug users. On view in the Merle-Smith Gallery on the first floor, the exhibition will remain open after hours, 4:30 to 9:00 pm, prior to and after each program.

"Corner Wars," a two act play, is the story of a day in the life of a group of young drug dealers working a street corner in North Philadelphia. Philadelphia playwright Timothy Dowlin, who studied theater at the High School for Creative and Performing Arts, wrote the play, his literary debut, which was first produced at 47th Street Theatre in New York by Theater for a New Generation in 2003. The play was awarded Newsday's George Oppenheimer award. Director Omar Evans organizes the reading; Mr. Dowlin joins for a question and answer period following the reading.

Visit the Theater for the New Generation

New York Times Theater Review by Bruce Webber
"'Corner Wars,' an urban drama conceived, written and performed with the earnestness and energy of the young, tells an ostensibly representative story about the street-level drug trade in Philadelphia. The content of the script, written by Tim Dowlin, is pretty familiar from television cop shows and movies about gangs, complete with a tragic conclusion involving teenagers with guns. And it takes the sympathetic, admonitory tone of an after-school special toward the excitable tough-talkers whose criminality is as culturally inevitable as, say, surfing is to the beachniks of Malibu." Read more