Lileana Blain-Cruz and Candrice Jones Team Up for Basketball Play FLEX
Theatre and sports will collide once again on stage in a new play coming to Off-Brodway. The New York premiere of Candrice Jones’ Flex will begin performances June 23 at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, and open July 20. LCT Resident Director Lileana Blain-Cruz will helm the production.
Flex tells the story of a girls’ high school basketball team from Plainnole, Arkansas. It’s 1997, and the women of the Lady Train team are inspired by the successes of the WNBA. With aspirations of going pro, they must first navigate the pressures of being young, Black, and female in rural Arkansas.
Complete casting and a design team for Flex will be announced at a later date. The play was developed at the 2020 Humana Festival of New American Plays. A co-world premiere by TheatreSquared and Theatrical Outfit took place last year. Jones’ other works include Crackbaby; her artistic mission is to write love letters for and to women of the American South.
Blain-Cruz most recently scored a Tony nomination for her direction of Thornton Wilder’s’ The Skin of Our Teeth at LCT. Other credits include the upcoming White Girl in Danger, Pipeline and the LCT3 productions of Marys Seacole and War.
This season, LCT is also producing The Coast Starlight, a new play by Keith Bunin, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, currently in previews at the Newhouse. Starting previews March 9 on Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre is Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot. The revival, starring Andrew Burnap, Phillipa Soo, and Jordan Donica, features an updated book by Aaron Sorkin and direction by Bartlett Sher.
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