We Take Care of Our Own

October 13 - 29, 2023

Playwright - Zainabu Jallo

Zainabu Jallo is a scholar, playwright, and portrait photographer. Her academic and creative works have been conveyed through Fellowships at the Sundance Theater Institute, The Institute for World Literature, Harvard University, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, Residenz Theater Munich, Chateau Lavigny, and House of Writers in Switzerland. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts England, and UNESCO Coalition of Artists for the General History of Africa. She is the author of award-winning plays - Onions Make Us Cry, Holy Night, and My Sultan Is A Rockstar. Jallo is Post-Doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Basel, Switzerland.  She is one of the 
Principal Investigators of the” Sacral Architecture Africa” Project. Her scholarly interests include The Afro-Atlantic, Iconic criticism, the history of Criminal Anthropology and Material Culture.

Director - Carlyle Brown

Carlyle Brown, Andrew W. Mellon Playwright-in-Residence is a playwright/performer, curator and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company based in Minneapolis. His plays have been produced at theatres across the country and internationally. His shows produced at Illusion include Finding Fish, Acting Black, A Play by Barb and Carl, History of Religion, and Down in Mississippi. Other Twin Cities productions include Little Tommy Parker’s Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show, and The African Company Presents Richard III at Penumbra Theater, Beggars’ Strike at the Children’s Theater Company, the Mixed Blood production of Pure Confidence that moved to off Broadway in New York, American Family at Park Square Theater. Other plays that have been produced across the country include The Negro of Peter the Great, A Big Blue Nail, Dartmoor Prison, The Pool Room, Yellow Moon Rising, Down in Mississippi, and Are You Now or Have You Ever Been. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and a Lifetime Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center.

The Play

We Take Care of Our Own peeks into the lives of three individuals facing the difficulties of ageing in the diaspora. Having interrupted familial traditions of intergenerational care by their choices to migrate, they attempt to find a sense of community as a medley of memories and apprehensions flood their conversations. — Zainabu Jallo (playwright)

In 2021, We Take Care of Our Own was presented in a virtual reading. Click here for more information on that reading and the play.

Click here to read an audience member’s response to the play.

Meet the cast and production team.

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Art Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.