Ray Pearcey

Ray Pearcey is a longtime Tulsan, writer, digital artist, and management consulting & public policy professional. His artistic interests include digital animation and modeling, experimental film and theater, and novel multimedia and interactive art. He has been a city planner, a technology executive, a creative services/art director, and a political consultant.  Pearcey has also been editor of the Oklahoma Eagle, a ninety-nine-year-old weekly newspaper, and a senior columnist for Urban Tulsa Weekly and Tulsa Voice. He has written widely on city politics, innovation, and new technologies, public policy, city planning, the environment, social/racial justice, geopolitics, biomedicine, the visual arts and film, economic development, and Tulsa "futures".  

Citizen Brady ¨Catches” a Charge

Ray Pearcey’s experimental three-act play, Citizen Brady “Catches a Charge,” is structured like a mock trial that allows community members to render a judgment of W. Tate Brady. Pearcey interrogates the Tulsa business leader’s role as a Ku Klux Klan member and instigator of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. For each performance, a random set of Tulsans will build the jury and hear arguments made by the prosecution and defense. Except for the lead actors, these legal teams will be composed of actual legal professionals.

Through this performance, the audience and the Tulsa “jury” members will decide whether to bring charges against Brady, reasserting the humanity of the victims of the Massacre and highlighting the notable absence of accountability in reckoning with the continued oppression of Black people in Tulsa and in the nation more broadly.

Citizen Brady “Catches a Charge” will be performed on July 30 and 31 at Church of the Restoration/Unitarian Universalist, 1314 N Greenwood Ave, Tulsa, OK.