Baltimore Center Stage stages spiritual ode to Black womanhood
Baltimore Center Stage’s Pray turns Sunday Baptist energy, music and ritual into a stage meditation on Black womanhood, with accessibility shows June 28 and July 3.
Baltimore Center Stage has turned its stage into a sanctuary for Pray, a production that wraps religion, performance art and Black womanhood into one communal evening. The show runs through July 5 and leans on music, dance, ritual and poetry to evoke the energy of a Sunday Baptist church service rather than a straight drama.
The theater describes the piece as “a sacred offering” created by nicHi douglas, who directs and choreographs, with music by S T A R R Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis. Baltimore Center Stage calls it a “kinetic and vibrant choreopoem” that celebrates and confronts “the complexity of spiritual inheritance,” a frame that lands in Baltimore, where Black church traditions and family faith histories remain central to neighborhood life and civic memory.
Brittny Smith, who plays Sister Anna Bertha, said the production is an ode to Black womanhood, matriarchs, femininity and spirituality, and to the kind of inquisitive thought that comes from examining one’s own spiritual journey. That explanation helps clarify why the work may resonate with Black women, churchgoers and theatergoers across Baltimore: it treats testimony, memory and embodied faith as lived realities, not abstract ideas.
The run opened June 13, with opening night set for June 20. Baltimore Center Stage has also scheduled a Touch Tour and audio-description performance on June 28 and an ASL performance on July 3, widening access to a piece built to feel like a “multigenerational congregation of Black womxn and femmes” gathered in song, dance and fellowship.
Pray first arrived as a world premiere at National Black Theatre in New York, and Baltimore Center Stage folded it into its 2025/26 season as work centered on spiritual inheritance and the divine power of Black women and femmes. In Baltimore, that emphasis gives the production a sharp local charge: it places Black creative expression, faith and identity on a major stage at a moment when many residents are looking for art that honors both tradition and change.
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