Representative Plays:
Too Heavy for Your Pocket (2017)
Bio:
Jirèh Breon Holder is a Memphis, Tennessee native and proud Morehouse Man. He grew up obsessed with Toni Morrison, South Park, and Joseph Campbell. Funny enough, Sarah Ruhl's playwriting program at the Yale School of Drama was the perfect training ground. At Yale, JBH wrote several plays that merged the political with the poetic. His favorites were a one man show reflecting on the prison-industrial complex and an Afro Futurist clown show where six Black astronauts attempt to colonize space. For his professional debut, JBH returned to his Southern roots to tell a story blending Holder Family lore with the little known history of Nashville’s Freedom Riders. Too Heavy for Your Pocket won the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition and subsequently had an extended off-Broadway run at the Roundabout Theatre. Too Heavy for Your Pocket has been produced regionally in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago, Des Moines to Houston, and more. JBH expanded his craft to the small screen, joining the writing team of NBC's hit medical drama New Amsterdam. In "Happy Place" (Season 1, Episode 19), JBH turned his own story into art when a journalist attempts to blackmail Dr. Floyd Reynolds with a mugshot from his past. JBH was a recipient of the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award and 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, then honored as the Fellowship of Southern Writers' 2017 Bryan Foundation Award for Drama. In June 2020, ...what the end willbe presented at the Roundabout Theater in New York.
Source: jirehbreonholder.com
Links:
Review of Too Heavy for Your Pocket