T Cat Ford

T. Cat Ford’s POW’R IN THE BLOOD opened Barter Theatre’s 75th Anniversary season. In 2016 HOW TO BE AN AMERICAN was presented in The York Theatre Company’s New2NY Series with Bill Castellino directing.  Other plays: THE CHAOS TRADE, an insider’s view of the financial meltdown; MERMEN, a space coast fantasy; VICTORIA & HENRY, Women’s Rights and Free Love in the 19th century and A SIMPLE GIFT, an a cappella musical set in a Shaker community.  Recently Queens Theatre In The Park featured her one-act play, Poolside, as a part of their New American Voices Play Reading Series and VICTORIA & HENRY was the subject of the Athena Project’s September 2020 “Read and Rant.” In 2016 she founded THE COFFEE COUNTY MEMORY PROJECT: The Integration Years (1966-1972), an oral history project focusing on federally mandated integration. Her newest play MIXING IT UP!!!!! A Story in Technicolor with Song, is based on this material.  An interactive art installation -Playback & Fast Forward is in development. In September 2020, with a grant from Georgia Humanities, a virtual museum installation was published using  collected audio and other artifacts.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
https://www.tcatford.com

MORE ABOUT ME
As a theatre student, I gravitated to the plays of Edward Bond and Peter Barns, whose content dictated form and challenged the bounds of conventional theatre. As an actor, I was fortunate to originate roles for Romulus Linney; another playwright whose themes dictated style. Additionally, Linney created characters who expressed themselves powerfully with plain but precise speech. Today in my historically based plays, I use the words of others to illuminate the worlds they inhabit. I am now exploring new ways of sharing  stories theatrically by combining  audio, exhibition practices and live performance.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
In 2016 I founded THE COFFEE COUNTY MEMORY PROJECT: The Integration Years (1966-1972), an oral history project focusing on federally mandated integration in Southern Georgia. I am currently creating monologues, short plays, radio plays and full length plays based on the stories collected from over 120 interviews.  MIXING IT UP!!!!!, a one-hour play with music for youth audiences, is currently available. True stories are interwoven to create a multi-dimensional look at the beginning of school integration and to shed light on the continuing process of racial understanding and reconciliation.

KEYWORDS
historical, young audiences, race relations, biography, drama, comedy