Since it’s launch in November of 2015, the Monday Night Theatre Forum has been delighting audiences with a wide array of theatre practitioners who share their unique experiences – their trials, triumphs and creative process growing in the craft. Thus far, the Monday Night Theatre Forum has featured Albert Laveau, Helen Camps, Dr. Efebo Wilkinson and Rhoma Spencer to name a few and on Monday 4th April 2016 at Trinidad Theatre Workshop, Freddie Kissoon will join that illustrious line up.
Freddie Kissoon is an actor, director, playwright and cultural ambassador who has won many awards both locally and internationally; among them the distinguished “Humming Bird Medal of Merit” for his contribution to the sphere of Culture and the “Icon of the Nation” award. His first got into theatre and acting in 1951 and by 1957 founded “the Strolling Players Theatre Company” which has enjoys the status of being Trinidad’s longest operating dramatic group, and went on to stage countless performances with over 139 plays, as many as 82 television plays and numerous radio and TV commercials.
Since then, Kissoon has written over 70 plays including the very popular “We Crucify Him” – staged annually during the Lenten season and “Calabash Alley” which was originally written as a radio play in 1970 but because of its overwhelming popularity, was adapted for the stage and subsequently a TV series staring Shirley “Beulah” King as one of its lead actors.
Many of Freddie Kisson’s plays have been staged all over the West Indies, New York, Washington, Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Montreal, London and Nigeria. Kissoon even wrote the script for Trinidad and Tobago’s first full-length movie “The Right and The Wrong” . Freddie Kissoon is described as a leading light in Caribbean Theatre in “The A to Z of African American Theater” by Anthony D. Hill and Douglas Q. Barnet published in 2009.
With all these accomplishments and accolades it’s tough to believe that Freddie Kissoon’s motivation to get into acting was the girls. Although the girls is what he came for, he stayed for so much more as he explains in the interview below.
Freddie Kissoon will present at the Monday Night Theatre Forum on Monday 4th April, 7pm at Trinidad Theatre Workshop.Admission is FREE but Space Is Limited. CLICK HERE to join the facebook event and email us at theatrebuzztt@gmail.com to RSVP.
The Trinidad and Tobago Performing Arts Network 