RED Summer
Center for Community Media
RED SUMMER is a new musical that bridges the past to the present. Set during the Chicago race riots of 1919, it tells the story of two soldiers—one Black, one white—who return from the battlefields of WWI only to find themselves caught in the violence of a city that is struggling to accommodate the Great Migration, a global pandemic, the return of war veterans, a downturn in the economy, and long standing ethnic tensions. Recently, Svetlana Rogachevskaya, Director of the Center for Performing Arts at Governors State University, had an opportunity to have a conversation with the RED SUMMER'S playwrights, Reginald Lawrence (Shepsu Aakhu) and Andy White. Playwrights Shepsu Aakhu and Andy White have been friends and colleagues in Chicago theater for more than thirty years and had long looked for an opportunity to work together but had not found the right project. Finally in 2017, they began co-writing RED SUMMER in response to our country’s continued racial divisions that chronically