Play examines real-life story of Robert Mugabe’s fear that he was being haunted by a former guerrilla leader (photo by Carl Wallnau)
BREAKFAST WITH MUGABE
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
August 7 – October 6, $25-$95
212-279-4200
www.breakfastwithmugabe.com
For more than thirty years, Robert Mugabe has been either prime minister or executive president of Zimbabwe, continually accused by the international community of multiple human rights violations. Currently in the midst of a campaign to remain president, he just publicly denounced homosexuality yet again, even bringing decapitation into the mix. “If you take men and lock them in a house for five years and tell them to come up with two children and they fail to do that, then we will chop off their heads,” he declared. A dozen years ago, the then-seventy-seven-year-old Mugabe started believing that former guerrilla leader Josiah Tongogara, who died in a car crash in 1980, was haunting him for turning his back on his beliefs. This strange but true tale forms the basis of Fraser Grace’s Breakfast with Mugabe, which examines Mugabe’s fear of Tongogara’s ghost. Originally produced at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Place in 2005, the play is making its New York debut August 7 – October 6 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, directed by David Shookhoff and starring Michael Rogers as Mugabe, Rosalyn Coleman as his second wife, Grace, Ezra Barnes as psychiatrist Andrew Peric, and Che Ayende as bodyguard Gabriel.
TICKET GIVEAWAY: Tickets for Breakfast with Mugabe are $25-$95, but twi-ny has three pairs to give away for free to performances August 7-31. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time most-hated international dictator to contest@twi-ny.com by Wednesday, July 31, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.