The Children of Children Keep Coming

Overview

Our Season of Adaptation continues with an OnQ original, based on the epic poem by Russell L. Goings, featuring images from world renowned visual artist and Charlotte Native, Romare Bearden. The Children of Children Keep Coming, adapted & directed for the stage by Artistic Director, Quentin Talley, presents a riveting chronicle of the African American experience in the United States. 

This Epic GriotSong, takes us on a dramatic odyssey with two anonymous slaves running to catch the Freedom Train, where at journey's end they hope to find liberation. Generation after generation, these determined travelers, with dangerous crows circling around them, roam through fields holding their dead; step over graves of the once enslaved; walk across beds of red, white, and blue flowers, all for the opportunity to one day march on the green lawns of democracy. Throughout their entangled journey, they meet imaginary and mythological characters. But it is down by the riverside where their belief that a time of change will come is affirmed by engagements with "giants" such as Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, Hank Aaron, Sojourner Truth, and Rosa Parks.

The Children of Children Keep Coming is strung seamlessly together -- by poetry and prose, blues and gospel, hymns and jazz, work songs and prayers -- forcing the universal harmony of the cry for freedom and justice to reach an unforgettable pitch that cannot be ignored.