University of Akron students will have the opportunity to see New World Performance Laboratory’s acclaimed production of “Death of a Man” the first part of the company’s Devil’s Milk Trilogy, a theatre project based on Akron’s relationship with rubber. Performances will be held Friday, September 8 at 7:30pm and Sunday, September 10 at 2pm in Sandefur Theatre, Guzzetta Hall on The University of Akron campus. Admission is free. Seating is very limited. For information and reservations call 330-972-7895. Each performance will be followed by an audience talkback session. These performances are part of The Devil’s Milk Trilogy—All Over Akron, funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as part of its Akron Knight Foundation Arts Challenge.

“Death of a Man,” which premiered in March 2017, is a solo performance conceived by and featuring Colombian actor Jairo Cuesta. Cuesta is a long-time Akron resident and Co-Artistic Director of NWPL, along with James Slowiak, a theatre professor at The University of Akron and director of the production. In this moving evocation of the jungles of the Amazon where countless indigenous men, women, and children were mutilated and massacred in the mad search for natural rubber, Cuesta seeks to lead the public on a quest for the sources of a city’s sorrow. Through his virtuosic physical and vocal skills, Cuesta enacts a ritual of storytelling, a sacrifice to heal the city by confronting the violence and blood on which the city is built.  “Death of a Man” is an attempt at authentic intercultural understanding by reengaging the past and bringing it alive in the present. The performance is not meant to sentimentalize the story or merely invoke empathy, but to interrogate, criticize, and empower by opening a dialogue between text, past, present, performer, and audience.  The performance event is based loosely on John Tully’s book, “The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber,” along with other historical and fictional sources. In 2016, Cuesta and Slowiak traveled to the Amazon where they engaged in meetings with members of the indigenous community represented in the performance. This intercultural exchange was made possible, in part, through a grant from the Network of Ensemble Theaters’ Travel & Exchange Network (NET/TEN), supported by lead funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Cuesta recently returned from the KO Festival of Performance in Amherst, MA where “Death of a Man” received rave reviews. Akron theatre critic David Ritchey wrote: “Everyone in Akron should see this show.” Since premiering The Devil’s Milk Trilogy in spring 2017 at The Balch Street Theatre, NWPL has been performing fragments of the productions or conducting workshops in relation to the work “all over Akron.” Funding for this project has also been received from the Ohio Arts Council, GAR Foundation, and The Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation.