IS YOU IS

On display for more than 30 years, the false racial science promoted in The Field Museum’s famous exhibit “The Races of Mankind” shaped how race was understood by millions of people, not only visitors but schoolchildren “educated” via its widely circulated materials.

This is a musical about the ‘science education’ we all were given, and a history that we share. Featuring a jazz-meets-musical theatre score, IS YOU IS follows two sets of characters in two different eras whose stories connect through their relationship to the exhibit, and through it, to each other as they struggle to triumph over ideas they’ve inherited and to reshape the institutions that shape their lives.

IS YOU IS illuminates the role that art, anthropology and an internationally recognized natural history museum played in promoting false racial science in the past, and the efforts of the Museum to come to terms with that past today.

This show is presented in a concert production that will feature a cast of local Oregon artists, an expanded jazz band, and mark the first collaboration between Washington County’s two resident professional theatres.

At the Broadway Rose New Stage
12850 SW Grant Avenue, Tigard, OR