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; 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 202627 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, 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.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
SYDNEY CHARLES (Tituba) is a Chicago-based creative whose work refuses easy category. She was last seen at Court as Tillie Binks in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Stage credits span Lyric Opera of Chicago, Steppenwolf, Goodman, Drury Lane, Northlight, Lookingglass, and Victory Gardens, among others. Select directing credits include the world premiere workshop of The Last Senior Home in Bronzeville, Bug at Steppenwolf (Associate Director, prior to Broadway transfer), and the Webby Award-winning Hamlet for Make-Believe Association (Associate Director). Co-creator, co-writer, and star of the Signal Award-winning, Tribeca Audio Premieres-selected audio drama Lake Song. Founder of Kaya Chronicles. Select voiceover clients include McDonald’s, M&Ms, and Xfinity. Television credits include The Chi, South Side, Shameless, and others. A 2025 NewCity Theatre Hall of Fame inductee. 3Arts Make a Wave Award recipient. Three-time Write Club Chicago winner. Member of AEA, SAG-AFTRA, and AGMA. Represented by Stewart Talent. Managed by ETC and Company.
WINSOME PINNOCK (Playwright) was born in Islington, North London. She is an award-winning playwright and dramaturg. Her work has been produced on the British stage and internationally since 1985. She was the first black British female writer to have a play produced by the Royal National Theatre. Winsome was Associate Professor in Drama at Kingston University from 2005 to 2019, and was Senior Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. She has worked as a dramaturg with the Royal National Theatre’s New Views scheme as well as with the Royal Court’s International Department. The prizes awarded to her work include the George Devine Award, The Pearson Plays on Stage Award, and the Unity Theatre Trust Award.
CHARLOTTE BRATHWAITE (Director) is a director and interdisciplinary artist who creates experiences where sound, movement, image, and story converge—illuminating diasporic life, memory, and radical possibility. Her practice is immersive, bringing together artists, scholars, young people, and communities to unfold stories of migration, resistance, and belonging. Brathwaite has collaborated with noted artists including Meshell Ndegeocello, Peter Sellars, Julie Mehretu, Jacqueline Woodson, and Kyle Abraham. Her work has been presented at The Shed, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Public Theater, Park Avenue Armory, Harlem Stage, BRIC, La MaMa, and internationally at the Holland Festival, Hebbel am Ufer, Dakar Biennale, and Chale Wote Festival. Recipient of the Doris Duke Artist, Creative Capital, and Princess Grace awards as well as a United States Artists Fellowship, she has held academic appointments at MIT and Amherst College. Brathwaite is co-founder of Malidoma Popenguine, an artist residency rooted in land, memory, and community in Senegal. MFA, Yale.
ESPERANZA SPALDING (Court Theatre Resident Artist: Music Composition)is an eaabibacliitoti* artist, trained and initiated in the North American jazz lineage and tradition. Her work interweaves various combinations of instrumental music, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, restorative urban land & artist-sanctuary custodianship, and growing in love as a daughter, sister, cousin, niece, auntie, great-auntie, friend. She founded and serves as co-director of Prismid Sanctuary, a non-profit that creates and stewards restorative artist residency & workshop space in Portland, Oregon (Prismid.org). With her dance project “Off Brand gOdds” and the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, she leads multi-week performances, workshops, teaching, and therapeutic-arts research residencies. She is a 2024 recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation Artist Award and a 2016 Ford Foundation “Art of Change” Fellow.
*European-African ancestored being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island
DR. AVERY WILLIS HOFFMAN (Production Dramaturg) is proud to join Court Theatre as the new Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director. Avery recently served as inaugural Artistic Director, Brown Arts Institute and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics at Brown University. Over the last two decades, she has curated multidisciplinary projects as inaugural Program Director at Park Avenue Armory, led content development for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History, managed Avery Productions, and produced multiple artistic collaborations with director Peter Sellars. A Marshall Scholar, Avery earned a DPhil and MSt in Classical Languages and Literature from Oxford, and a BA in Classics and English from Stanford.
SJ ZHANG (Creative Consultant) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is currently working on a project about Tituba that examines her testimony and subsequent representations through a lens of North American bondage and the historical carceral state. Zhang teaches the literature and archives of slave and maroon narratives, constructions of gender, race and sexuality before 1850, the work of Toni Morrison, and archival theory and method. Her forthcoming book is called Going Maroon and Other Forms of Family: Recapture, Reproduction and Representation in Archives of Marronage.