Intersection for the Arts presents TREE CITY LEGENDS: the world premiere of a new performance by emerging playwright/musician Dennis Kim, directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and the third installment of Intersection for the Arts’ and Resident Theatre Company Campo Santo’s Next series.

Tree City Legends is a multidisciplinary theater work that melds post-hip hop aesthetics, urban folklore, Korean traditional tales, live music, legend, and parable. It is all together, part bildungsroman, part blues song, and part Book of Jonah remix.

Biblical imagery, multi-perspective narrative, and a sense of longing underpin the main character, Junie’s story. These elements haunt Junie’s rise and demise as a folk-singing sensation and eventual escapist. The bitter realities of the neighborhood block and a ghostly past loom in the background as a family of brothers struggles to make sense of a world that was not made with them in mind.

The piece expands beyond any specific Korean American experience and explores the profound feelings of rootlessness and abandonment of urban people of color, specifically Asian Pacific Islander American immigrants in tracing the lives of the Kane brothers.

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