Sandra Seaton is a playwright and librettist. Her plays have been performed throughout the country and her libretto for the opera From the Diary of Sally Hemings, with music by Pulitzer Prize winning Michigan composer William Bolcom, has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. The Bridge Party, the first of Sandra Seaton’s thirteen plays, portrays a group of Black women whose weekly bridge game is interrupted by news of a lynching. The play dramatizes the ways in which these women deal with the racism of their era while still maintaining their dignity and self worth. Ruby Dee starred in a 2008 performance. In The Will, Seaton’s play about a Black family during Reconstruction, the sons return from service in the Union army expecting to be treated as full citizens but find that victory at home is more elusive than victory on the battlefield.
Seaton’s other works include Music History or A Play About Greeks and SNCC in 1963, about college students who, in the backdrop of sorority initiations and segregation, face the dangers of civil rights organizing in the South, King: A Reflection on the Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with spirituals sung by Metropolitan Opera tenor George Shirley and Chicago Trilogy, performed as a part of the 2015 Atlanta Black Theatre Festival.
In January 2020 the opera Night Trip, Sandra Seaton’s collaboration with composer Carlos Simon, about a young woman’s journey to Tennessee to visit her relatives in the fifties, premiered at the Kennedy Center. In 2021, the opera Night Trip will be performed at Oregon’s Portland Opera. Premieres of Seaton’s new work are scheduled in 2021 at LA Opera, Dallas’s Turtle Creek Chorale and Glimmerglass Festival.
For more information go to www.sandraseaton.com