By A. Zell Williams
Directed by Aldo Billingslea
In The Urban Retreat, a supernova rap star has taken a retreat in Marin County to write his memoir…at 25, so he can stand where Tupac stood. He selects as his ghostwriter an adversary from his past...his high school English teacher.
Fiercely funny, gripping and raw, A. Zell William’s, THE URBAN RETREAT is a powerful new American play about Chaucer Mosley, an English teacher and long-rejected writer, hired by a publisher of Urban Lit to turn the grandiose ramblings of a rap superstar into a compelling memoir. Unimpressed by the material but desperate for money, Mosley takes on the assignment. But when the rapper turns out to be a former student that Mosley unknowingly failed, the writing process becomes a surprising and deeply honest exchange about survival, selling out and what it means to be a black man in America today.