'sweet lorraine' Production Fund

Help Celebration Theatre, Southern California's longest-running queer arts nonprofit, bring a monumental story to the stage in its 2026-27 Season. 

The Edward Limato Foundation has generously offered the theatre a $15,000 match donation; with your help we will launch our funding path to a successful, fully realized West Coast Premiere of this necessary work for our Black and queer community. We believe we can create an iconic moment in LGBTQ+ theatre...in our current social environment, this is a powerful opportunity to plant a flag and declare: "Our stories will never be erased."

Funds raised from this match will allow us to organize a backer's audition performance, following any further script refinements.

ABOUT 'SWEET LORRAINE'

After sold-out performances at the 2024 Off-Broadway Downtown Urban Arts Festival, Celebration Theatre presented a one-night-only, West Coast Premiere reading of Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj's sweet lorraine, a play inspired by the enduring friendship of Black, queer literary icons Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. The play offers an intimate imagining of the final conversation between best friends in Lorraine's New York City hospital room in January 1965. Set one week prior to Lorraine's passing from pancreatic cancer, the story explores the complex, dynamic, and often heated relationship between these two prolific, creative giants and American artist-activists.

Following a developmental workshop at Los Angeles LGBT Center directed by five-time Tony Award nominated director/choreographer Camille A. Brown, audiences were invited to experience this new work, brought to life by the luminous talents of LA Drama Critics Circle Award winner Ashley Romans* (Y: The Last Man, NOS4A2) as “Lorraine Hansberry”, Tony nominee Ato Blankson-Wood* (B’way: Slave Play, When They See Us) as “James Baldwin”, two-time Obie Award winner and Tony Award nominee Charlayne Woodard* (B’way: Ain’t Misbehavin’, Pose), William Allen Young* (CSI: Miami, Women of Brewster Place), Jill Alexander* (Silicon Valley, Mad Men), and Steven Weber* (Wings, B’way: The Producers), with stage directions read by Leo Sheng* (The L Word: Generation Q).

The play was a semi-finalist for this year's prestigious Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference.

Would you help us on this journey? We need you and invite you in! Thank you.