Breakfast with Mugabe – Location, Tickets, Reviews
Following a successful run earlier this year, Fraser Grace’s intense play Breakfast with Mugabe returns to the New York stage with its original cast for an 8-week run on Theatre Row.
In the early 2000s, reports emerged that Robert Mugabe, the powerful, tyrannical president of conflict-torn Zimbabwe, was undergoing treatment for depression. Breakfast with Mugabe is the entirely-imagined dramatization of his encounters with a therapist.
Mugabe, who is black, believes he is being haunted by the spirit of a dead comrade and fellow-revolutionary. He reaches out to Dr. Peric, a white farm owner and psychiatrist, for help. Racial tensions, power struggles, and the weight of the country’s political history infiltrate these tense sessions, aggravated by the constant intervention of Mugabe’s wife, Grace, and the president’s bodyguard, Gabriel.
The play is more than just an exploration of a powerful dictator’s psyche. It is also part thriller – Mugabe’s dictatorial tendencies close in on the doctor, who realizes rather quickly that the usual therapist-patient relationship is not to be – and part history lesson on post-colonial Africa.
Viewers who are not familiar with Zimbabwe’s troubled history will leave better educated, if a little lost on the details. In its run earlier this year, the production received positive reviews from many publications, and it was a New York Times critics pick, all due, in large part, to the excellent cast who make Breakfast with Mugabe a compelling experience.
TICKETS
$64-$89 (click here for ticket)
DATES
December 29, 2013 through March 1, 2014
LOCATION
Lion Theatre, Theatre Row
410 West 42nd Street
New York City
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RUNNING TIME
1 hour 30 minutes, no intermission
REVIEWS
Past reviews
Pershing Square Signature Center production, August 2013
Blog Critics
The play is cerebral, intricate, surprising, foreboding, powerful. I loved it
New York Times
Oppressed becomes Oppressor
Theatermania
Rogers hauntingly captures Africa’s longest-serving president, a man who need not raise his voice to keep those around him walking on eggshells.
Time Out
Grace’s play—directed with forceful simplicity by David Shookhoff—is tough-minded and unsentimental, gazing squarely at the postcolonial puzzle of modern-day Africa.
CAST & CREW
(partial list)
Written by Fraser Grace
Directed by David Shookhoff
Featuring Michael Rogers, Ezra Barnes, Roslyn Coleman, Che Ayende