The Roundtable Ensemble

Weaving the untold history of Nancy Green, the first African-American woman hired to play the part of 'Aunt Jemima' at the 1893 World's Fair with African-American activists like Ida B. Wells, who struggled to have black women represented at the very same World's Fair, The Mammy Project uses original music, storytelling and historical speeches to transform an oppressive stereotype into a celebration of the power we gain from knowing and understanding our history.

Michelle Matlock, a character actress and physical comedienne, digs deep into her own experience, imagination, and American history to deliver a personal, political and entertaining expose. Since 2001 The Mammy Project has helped schools kick off their diversity, black, and women's history month celebrations, exploring questions about stereotype, icon and myth in an educational, entertaining and inclusive manner.

The Mammy Project played in rotating repertory with Silence and The Taming of the Shrew.

A High 5 Pick of the Week.

Off-Off Online Pick of the Week.

A New York Theatre Experience Editor's Pick.

The piece takes us on an imaginative and challenging journey. Matlock's energized, vivid, and nuanced performance holds the center from start to finish. The Mammy Project is indeed a project - an open exploration of an evolving issue that is too complicated, and fascinating, to contain in a box.
          - Jason Jacobs, The New York Theatre Experience

Writer and performer Michelle Matlock blows the lid off this century-old pancake box in her must-see one-woman show about a former slave named Nancy Green, who found everlasting fame as the smiling face of Aunt Jemima. There are scenes and images in The Mammy Project that will stick to your heart.
          - Adrienne Cea, Off-Off Online

Matlock's show is designed to travel and to provoke conversation. She invokes and troubles the images of actresses Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Whoopi Goldberg, and even Oprah, the latter once called "the corporate mammy" by a journalist. These women, Matlock asserts, supposedly paved the way for a world of greater showbiz opportunity. What she discovers is that no historical heroine is reducible to her residual image and that residual images die hard. Her inventive performance piece shares that discovery in a way that is always engaging, well-researched, and impossible to ignore.
          - Dorothy Chansky, New York Theatre Wire

Matlock's one-woman show, The Mammy Project, is a provocative piece of theater that entertains and educates. . . . You do laugh, but you gasp too, because Matlock has made you see something you never saw before, and that's always a little scary-wonderful. Matlock's show makes you realize how embedded the Mammy stereotype is in our culture and how it has, like so many stereotypes, simultaneously been a source of subjugation and empowerment. Matlock's show . . . invites the audience to step out of the box and "pave a new road. Cuz fantasies," Aunt Jemima says, "only live as long as you let them."
          - Margaux Laskey, Feminist Review

In The Mammy Project, writer and performer Matlock has constructed a collage of the mammy and her many incarnations (both animate and inanimate). She uses her own experiences as a young actress to launch into the poignant biography of Nancy Green, the original Aunt Jemima of the ubiquitous syrup. With her deep, elastic voice and regal presence, Matlock is a born orator.
          - Amy Krivohlavek, Show Business Weekly

In telling the story of Nancy Green, the first African-American woman to play the part of "Aunt Jemima," Matlock exposes the ugliness of a stereotype by humanizing its portrayer. In Matlock's nuanced and lively investigation of this little known figure in African-American history, the Mammy becomes more than a broad sketch of passive black domesticity. In the middle of Aunt Jemima's patter, the truths that go unspoken speak volumes.
          - Jessica Freeman-Slade, New Theater Corps

Interpersing historical tidbits about Nancy Green - the first "Aunt Jemima" spokes-model - and a hip hop examination of the minstrel show in the context of American music alongside her own personal monologue about being typecast as a maid, Matlock pulls all sorts of theatrical tricks from under her oversized apron. . . . But is she effective? Yes.
          - Christopher Tkaczyk, Show Showdown

African American writer and actress Michelle Matlock straps on her apron and kerchief to recount the untold story of Aunt Jemima and her subsequent influence on the culture. The World’s Fair of 1893, the minstrel show, and early cinema will feature. We’re confident this re-examination of cultural history won’t be at all syrupy.
          - Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice

Read Managing Director Joshua P. Weiss' interview with nytheatre voices here.

Read writer/performer Michelle Matlock's interview with Laura Deni in Broadway To Vegas here.

For more information about Michelle and the show, visit www.themammyproject.com.