Say Hello to the Tituba Creative Team
The Tituba team is growing! We are thrilled to share that Grammy Award winner and newly appointed Resident Artist esperanza spalding has signed on to compose the music and sonic landscape of Winsome Pinnock’s exhilarating production; award-winning director Charlotte Brathwaite has signed on to direct; Kent Barrett, a frequent collaborator of Brathwaite’s, will helm scenic and lighting design; and actor Sydney Charles will play the titular role. University of Chicago professor SJ Zhang will provide additional dramaturgical support.
Tituba Production Dramaturg and Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director Avery Willis Hoffman shares, “One of the great joys of the creative process is partnership. This collaboration between esperanza spalding, Charlotte Brathwaite, Sydney Charles, SJ Zhang, and Court offers a unique opportunity to activate Winsome Pinnock’s evocative script in a fresh and exciting way, transforming Tituba from a dynamic staged production into a multidisciplinary theatrical spectacle. This honoring, this creative exploration in the unusual theatrical setting of the iconic Rockefeller Chapel, is a fitting reclamation and tribute to the person at the heart of it all: Tituba herself.”
In this solo performance, Tituba—the real-life person first accused in the Salem witch trials of 1692 and featured in Arthur Miller’s classic drama, The Crucible—invites the audience to journey through Tituba’s mystical, sonically complex world to hear her side of the story. Set in pre-Revolutionary War America and asking urgent questions that still resonate today, Pinnock’s script keenly weaves the threads of history to blur the lines between past and present—a timely response to our nation’s upcoming America250 celebrations and the 2026/27 season’s theme of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit. Tituba questions what’s accepted as truth and traditional methods of storytelling; on the other side is an entire untapped world of potential—potential for healing, for redemption, and for boundless expression.
Charlotte Brathwaite joins the project with extensive experience in immersive performance, a perfect fit for this site-specific production staged at the University of Chicago’s iconic Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Her creative practice combines narrative, sound, movement, and space, and her genre-defying practice centers the histories and imagined futures of communities that have been historically excluded. esperanza spalding will work closely with Charlotte and Avery on curating and crafting the soundscape of Tituba’s world, composing original music to enhance and amplify the storytelling. The creative team now also includes Sydney Charles, a regular on Chicago stages who was last seen in Court’s production of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; Kent Barrett, a multidisciplinary designer and artist who has developed a wide-ranging body of work that spans collaborative, contemporary performance, experimental theater, and new media; and SJ Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, whose scholarship focuses on transnational literary histories and seventeenth-through nineteenth-century archives of slavery and marronage in the United States and Caribbean, with a forthcoming book on historic representations of Tituba.
We cannot wait to partner with these innovative and award-winning artists to bring Tituba’s story to life.
Tituba will be performed in December 2026 and is included in both Reserved Seat and Flex subscriptions, available now. Individual tickets will be available on Monday, September 14.