THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS
by Dinaw Mengestu

April 14—May 9, 2009
Previews: April 14-16
Opening Night: Friday, April 17
Center House Theatre, Seattle Center

Evening shows begin at 7:30pm
Matineés begin at 2:00pm
Running Time: 2 hours, 20 minutes, including intermission

BUY TICKETS NOW Ticket Prices

"Everything is connected. They're not just accidents… That's the way these things begin. With a handful of small actions that build and build."

--Dinaw Mengestu, from The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears

Years after his escape from Ethiopia’s revolution, we meet Sepha in his failing convenience store in a rundown Washington, D.C. neighborhood. His unexpected and rejuvenating friendship with new neighbors, Judith, a white academic, and her bi-racial daughter, upsets the neighborhood’s racial politics and pulls sharply into focus the contrasts in his life: past and present, hope and despair, black and white, home and away. Selected as the 2008 Seattle Reads book, Mengestu’s award-winning debut novel makes palpable the realities of immigrant life in contemporary America.

CAST & ARTISTS | MEET THE AUTHOR

From a conversation with author Dinaw Mengestu about his novel,
The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, Riverhead Books, 2007:
I wouldn’t say that this is an African novel, or African-American novel. To me, it’s a novel about America, with all of its competing and sometimes conflicting identities. Of course, growing up black and African in America has shaped my writing and experiences in more ways than I could possibly state, and yet I have to argue for the singularity of my opinion and perspective on this, which is to say I grew up and continue to live in different communities, some predominantly white, some predominantly African-American or African. Personally, for me, if there is a new perspective on race relations that comes from being an African immigrant it stems from this sense of never wholly identifying with one category.

was made possible, in part, by