Verses At Work is hip hop theater at it’s finest. New York City-based hip hop artist, actor, and writer Malik Work bares his soul and shares a piece of his story, as well as NYC history. Work tells a true story that documents and testifies to the birth of a music scene in the East Village. Hip hoppers and conventional jazz musicians begin to join forces on stage to create an unprecedented sound and scene around the turn of the millennium. Behind that scene, love, race, money, class and struggle all intertwine for an experience that is true to the name of the band they formed: The Real Live Show.
Through laughter and tears, Verses At Work inspires and educates. Malik masterfully weaves verse, spoken word, monologue, hip hop, and documentary, in this exciting, provocative, and refreshingly new piece of theater.
About the Artist
Malik Work, the NYC based actor-teacher-writer-emcee is a founding member of the groundbreaking jazz/hip hop conglomerate: The Real Live Show. He has written and starred in a one man show entitled Verses At Work, for which he was nominated for Best Solo Performance at the AUDELCO Awards. The remix version of the show was recently featured on tour with the Public Theater’s Mobile Unit. He also wrote, starred in, and executive produced a film version of Verses @ Work that was notably selected by the Hip Hop Film Festival, and won the International Spotlight Award at the Los Angeles Brazilian Film Festival. His recent television credits include Broad City on Comedy Central and Blacklist: Redemption on NBC. He has provided award-winning voice-overs for national network commercials, scripted television, radio, and internet. Malik is also the voice of Planet Word, an immersive museum of the English language in Washington, D.C., billed as the world’s first voice-activated museum. He’s composed and performed poetry for Webby Award-winning project People Not Property, an historic preservation and educational website for Historic Hudson Valley. Malik recently created a film interpretation of the first published African-American writer Jupiter Hammon’s poem An Essay on Slavery, on exhibit at Preservation Long Island’s Joseph Lloyd Manor, which is recognized as a National Literary Landmark. He teaches acting, Shakespeare, theater arts, creative writing, hip hop and hip hop theater, locally and internationally. He is a faculty member and alumnus of the National Theater Institute, and a teaching artist for the Public Theater. His show Verses @ Work has taken many forms: an experimental Odyssey version debuted at Park Avenue Armory in NYC, an immersive Black History version debuted at Nublu 151 in NYC, and a “post”-pandemic version debuted at Joe’s Pub, while the international version has thrived in South Africa – where the South African press called him “the griot from New York, Shakespeare of the streets” – most recently at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, formerly known as Grahamstown. Follow him: @malikwork on IG, @malikworks on Twitter, www.malikwork.com, www.versesatwork.net