Where the Actor is a Liberator
Kangalee Arts Ensemble, Inc.
Design by Brian Alessandro, 2025
“My Dying City (or: The Social Justice Suicide Hour”) is the Ensemble’s latest work-in-progress. A result of the Action Lab’s Artist-in-Action Fellowship to playwright Dennis Leroy Kangalee - this new provocative theater piece about a disillusioned radical Left couple, the impact of genocide, and the consequence of their rogue radio show - unveiled its opening sequence to the public on May Day 2025 in a free open rehearsal for invited guests. The experience was humbling and led us to the edge of our imagination. The formal play shall premiere in January 2026. Stay tuned!
THEATER OF SILENCE:
Henry Miller & Samuel Becket
Hassan’s incredible analysis of Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett was a primary influence on the Ensemble’s fourth season.
While the Ensemble’s dramatic works illuminate outrage at our moral failures their interpretations of both Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller engage the tremor of silent screams and public humiliations.
HENRY MILLER’S cryptic and spiritually awakened short story, “The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder”, reads like a delirious 40 page poem about the crucifixion, resurrection and assassination of a clown whose sin is a belief in giving joy and serving mankind. One of the most agreeable, yet highly overlooked, fictional pieces by Brooklyn’s own original maverick writer. For the first time ever, it has been adapted to the American stage. Read more about the much anticipated new solo piece, SMILE: A Clown’s Ascension which premieres October 15, 2025.
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SAMUEL BECKETT’S forlorn and mesmerizing monologues about stasis, aging, loneliness, memory and the oppressiveness of failure galvanized the company’s leap back into the absurd when Kangalee Arts decided to tour a special double of Beckett’s solo plays.
“TECHNOLOGY AND THE HUMAN CRY” highlighted the themes and approaches to two Samuel Beckett plays that are not foretelling doom -- they are the results of it. Kangalee Arts kicked off the new year ringing in the grave absurdity of our times with Krapp's Last Tape & Rockaby. Both monologues were performed by Dennis Leroy Kangalee and Justine Stock. The special limited engagement on the West Coast - Carmel and Big Sur - closed January 28, 2025 to sold out audiences. We were honored to have played at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts and the Henry Miller Memorial Library.
“Krapp’s Last Tape and Rockaby are startling plays about more than failure or regret or memories, their characters signify the end of an era...for themselves...the audience...our society.” ”
Manny Espinoza’s promo stills for the Beckett Monodramas: Justine Stock as W in “Rockaby” and Dennis Leroy Kangalee as Krapp in “Krapp’s Last Tape” - from the Carl Cherry Center premiere of the revival in Carmel, CA January 23, 2025. Directed by Dennis Leroy Kangalee.
FROM STANISLAVSKI TO FRANTZ FANON
“Kangalee as Krapp and Stock in Rockaby were tragic and funny...Both plays portrayed people who many of us will become someday, asking bold questions about aging.”
The Kangalee Arts Ensemble makes Beckett and Henry Miller as urgent as their protest dramas and as entertaining as their Actor’s exercises.
Dennis Leroy Kangalee directing theater stalwart, Ward Nixon. (2023, The Bowery, NYC)
“…Dennis Leroy Kangalee’s vision of a theater company is like a culmination of American Theater’s past 100 years. From Ira Aldridge to the Group Theater to the passionate agitprop of the Black Arts Movement and the The Living Theater. His dramatic works are chock-full of ideas, overwhelmingly so…but the best cocktail of the personal and political.”
— Kam Williams, Village Voice
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The KANGALEE ARTS ENSEMBLE, INC. is a 501-C3 BIPOC non-profit theater company devoted to the collision of radical politics, classical theater aesthetics, & the liberation of the actor.
Our playwrights write specifically for certain actors in the company or rehearse and work out ideas collectively before the writer goes off to organize the chaos and return with a script that is challenging in content and style. Language and structure are major components being forgotten in so-called “politically oriented drama,” but simply in theater in general.
A conceptual and ever-changing ensemble or group of actors (10 permanent members at the moments, 2 writers and 8 actors) Kangalee Arts works hard to achieve that delicate balance in theater: between high poetry, entertainment, agitprop, the avant-garde and the leap towards transcendence. Never forsaking one for the other.
With their provocative 2024 drama, The Life & Death of Art, the group’s first original work which openly equated the repression of artists with the oppression against Blacks and Palestinians, experiences and ideas from corners of the arts and trenches of revolutionary activism were applied. Premiering in April 2024, the play exemplified the group’s aim of blending the personal with the political. And by doing this, galvanizing both the idea of the dramatic written word and the role of the performing artist.
For revolutions come - not just as thieves in the night - but on the backs of actors…
The original cast of the NYC premiere of The Life & Death of Art in April 2024.