- This event has passed.
Bottle Tree Theatre’s The Recipe Book presents Get Me Melvina Gast
Bottle Tree Theatre presents
The Recipe Book: A Reading Series
The April Recipe:
Get Me Melvina Gast
Written by Christina Anthony
Directed by Chelsea Boyd
Click here for tickets!
When you close your eyes and picture America’s sweetheart, does she have a Jheri curl? Hotter than fish grease, baby! That’s Melvina Gast, a former Jet Beauty-of-the-Week surviving in South Central Los Angeles and forging her way through the cut-throat world of multi-cam sitcoms in 1983 Hollywood. Back home in the Midwest, her young godchild comes of age. It seems they couldn’t be further apart as one chases visibility while the other begs to be invisible.
Join an evening of imaginative storytelling and powerful performances as Bottle Tree Theatre brings this masterful script to life for one night only!
The Recipe Book
A monthly reading series spotlighting new works by emerging Black playwrights while honoring lesser-known Black writers whose stories helped shape the field.
Why the Recipe Book?
The Recipe Book takes its name from the act of passing down knowledge—much like your grandma’s sweet potato pie recipe. If not shared, it risks being lost forever.
This series honors that tradition. Each play is a recipe: rich, cultural, storied. We have the honor of passing down the work already gifted to us by prolific but lesser-known Black playwrights such as Shirley Graham Du Bois, Alice Childress, Samm-Art Williams, J.e. Franklin, and Pearl Cleage, while also making room for the living history we’re creating with emerging Black playwrights.
The Recipe Book reminds us that art is not only communal, but also a call to action, a tool of hope, and a blueprint for the future—one that has often already been drafted for us by artists who came before or who are yet to be discovered. The weapons are already in the house. We just need to keep them active—and pass them down.