HeartBeat Ensemble offers us a peek, even if only by way of musings, into the lives of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry in Jimmy & Lorraine. The convergence of art, love, and politics is a camp fire by which Black revolutionaries sat in the company of other brilliant, bar-raising, freedom-fighting, creative spirits. We honor their contributions and all of their sacrifices in the fight that should not have been— in their tenacity in keeping the baton of the struggle for longer than anyone should ever have to embody the vitriol of vehement and baseless rejection. We’ve gone as far as romanticizing the fight, given its own resilience. But, Jimmy & Lorraine romanticizes the sacrificial lives of two of Black History’s own in a new way. This production imagines what the love and camaraderie between these two civil rights visionaries could have been in a visual salve that attempts to heal the wounds created by the relentless battles they fought for a better America.

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