Allison Davis

It’s This American Life’s wildest, most ambitious live show ever! Nearly 50 actors, singers, dancers, musicians and comedians joined Ira Glass onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House on June 7th, 2014 to try some things they'd never tried before. The result? Journalism turned into opera, into plays, into a Broadway musical. Comedy from Mike Birbiglia, and SNL’s Sasheer Zamata. Songs from Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. Dance from Monica Bill Barnes & Company.

America has yet to heal from the trauma of its darkest era, and Winfred Rembert is living proof of that. Rembert, who lived on a plantation, joined the civil rights movement as a teen and was put to work on a chain gang, is a rare survivor of a lynching attempt. Decades later, he still carries the scars. “That lynching is on my back, and it’s dragging me down, even today,” he says. As he etches the history, bloodsoaked and cruel, into leatherwork, fellow artist Dr. Shirley Jackson Whitaker organizes a different kind of ceremony to search for healing. “It’s not just black history,” she says. “This is American history.”

In a dystopian future where people live nocturnally to avoid the harmful rays of the sun, a young black girl unravels the lie that has kept her and her sister in the dark.

Moses Johnson is a promising high-school athlete with a bright future who’s accused of murdering a police officer during a drug bust gone wrong. Swept up into the infamously corrupt Chicago criminal justice system, Moses’ case is taken up by ageing public defender Franklin Roberts, who sees this as his chance to finally challenge the institutional racism at the heart of the judicial system.

Follow young Cora’s journey as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. After escaping her Georgia plantation for the rumored Underground Railroad, Cora discovers no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad full of engineers and conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil.

A 14-year-old prodigy's mother relies on him to find a way out of poverty, but he is haunted by the death of his friend; he must choose between the streets that raised him or the higher education that may offer him a way out.