Brava Theater: Duck Gulps in Silence: A Staged Reading Written by AeJay Antonis Marquis
Brava Theatre Center is proud to present the Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experiences (BACCE) staged reading of Duck Gulps in Silence, a searing, lyrical new play by AeJay Antonis Marquis, directed by the luminous Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe, Artistic Director of BACCE. This event marks Marquis’s return to Brava Theatre Center — their first artistic home in the Bay Area — in a full-circle moment of community, memory, and artistic lineage.
Set “between home and escape,” Duck Gulps in Silence follows Paul, a queer Black man navigating the inherited weight of grief, family expectation, and the fragile work of staying alive. With biting humor, ancestral memory, and poetic rupture, the play interrogates Black masculinity, queerness, faith, and the cost of emotional repression, while offering a radical invitation to softness, intimacy, and survival.
Thank you to the Zellerbach Foundation and The Kenneth Rainin Foundation for making this possible.
No one turned away for lack of funds NOTFLOF
Ticket prices have been scaled to PWYC (Pay What You Can)
$2-10: Pay What You Can
$15-25 Suggested Donation
$30-50 Contribution to Future BACCE Productions