A year after packing Kingston’s Courtleigh Auditorium, Patrick Brown’s hit farce Room 513 is trading uptown traffic for I-95. Beginning June 13, the play launches a six-city sprint across New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey—this time coupling its rapid-fire punch-lines with a deliberate push for post-hurricane recovery.
Brown’s script follows Lance Robinson, a hotel handyman whose wandering gaze threatens his otherwise normal marriage. Glen Campbell reprises the lead opposite Quera South, while Courtney Wilson and Sharee McDonald-Russell keep the complications piling up. But the real pay-off sits well beyond the stage: a slice of every ticket will underwrite laptops, tablets, desks, and chairs for Jamaican schools still struggling after Hurricane Beryl’s rampage last July. The same fund will shoulder shipping costs and seed new scholarships.
“I’d be acting for free in my living room anyway,” Campbell quipped. “Better to funnel the jokes into something that restocks a science lab or sends a kid to college.”
DCM Films’ Donny McTaggart—one of the tour’s architects—expects a surge of nostalgia-hungry islanders to fill the auditoriums. “Nothing unites the diaspora like a good belly laugh in patois,” he said. “We’re giving them six chances.”
Tour Itinerary
- June 13 – Mary Louis Academy, Jamaica, Queens, NY
- June 14 – Central High School, Bridgeport, CT
- June 15 – Harry S Truman High School, The Bronx, NY
- June 27 – Weaver High School, Hartford, CT
- June 28 – Tilden High School, Brooklyn, NY
- June 29 – Cicely L Tyson Community School of Performing & Fine Arts, Orange, NJ
Last summer’s Kingston run stretched three sold-out months; organizers are betting the tri-state’s Caribbean community will deliver the same energy—this time turning applause into algebra tablets and art-room easels back home.
