In Queen, a grandmother suffers the loss of a grandchild, navigates grief, and retrieves memory — sharing it in a new world run by, loved by, kept whole by a solidarity of grandmothers. The emotional heart of the piece is fired by compassion for the death of so many young African Americans at the hand of civil power.

A robust cohort of collaborators, horizontally arrayed, present a full-length puppet-play that inverts a convention, putting a grandmother’s wandering, transformation and adventures at the center, rather than leaving her in the parentheses. The piece involves contemporary accounts of flight and exile, with special attention paid to the witness, report and transmission of story and memory.