Lucky 13: Free You Mind (and let the girl talk.) embraces four new works by four living playwrights. The box office is OFFICIALLY open. Join us for another year of artistic adventure. And sign up now for our summer camp the week of July 15 (ages 8 – 18). I’ll see you at the Shack!
ANNOUNCING THE YEAR AT VENUS:
April 2013
Following Sarah
by Rich Espey
Opens April 4 – 28 Thursday Friday Saturday at 8, Saturday and Sunday at 3.
Cross country star Sarah Gardner was the picture of perfection. At only 18 years old her career at Thwaite Academy could not have been more impressive. So, why did she make such a devastating choice? This choice haunted classmates Julia, Maddie, and Kat silently at first and then in unexpected ways. New arrival Kenya did not bargain for this kind of perfection-pressure. Julia’s bad habits invite hallucination appearances from her coach and birth Father among other people and objects. In the end, could it be that the Geometer moth holds the key?
“Oh, I know when we stand before a helpless Doom how hard it is to bear.”
Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, ll. 1369-70.
“The real destroyer of our happiness is always there within us…So long as the enemy is there, and so long as we are under its control, there can be no permanent happiness.”
His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Rich Espey is a playwright, actor and teacher living in Baltimore. Rich’s plays have been produced throughout the United States, including an Equity Showcase production of Hope’s Arbor in New York City by Gallery Players/Engine 37. Rich is a three time winner of the Carol Weinberg Award for best play at the Baltimore Playwrights Festival and was honored with an Individual Artist Award in Playwriting by the Maryland State Arts Council in both 2007 and 2012. He has studied extensively with playwright Jeffrey Sweet and is an alumnus of the Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive whose teachers include Gary Garrison, Marsha Norman, Lee Blessing, David Ives and Heather McDonald. He has served as a Playwright Mentor for Center Stage’s Young Playwrights Festival and teaches playwriting there as well. Currently the Baltimore region representative for The Dramatists Guild of America, he has also served as Chair of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival. He recently completed a four-year term as Board President for Single Carrot Theatre and proudly teaches science at The Park School of Baltimore. Ages 16+ – Following Sarah deals with difficult subject matter but the characters are in High School.
June 2013
GRIEVING FOR GENEVIEVE
by Kathleen Warnock
Open June 6-30 Thursday Friday Saturday at 8, Saturday and Sunday at 3.
Late one summer in a Baltimore working-class neighborhood somewhere in the mid-’90s, the three Peck sisters reunite with their chain-smoking mother Genevieve, a retired nurse. Middle sister Delilah is getting married for the third time and the unlikely wedding party (more the punchline for a dirty joke) gathers for the holy day. Middle sister Delilah is a Girl Scout Leader, erotic apparel designer, and frontwoman of the Hamilton Harlots rock band. Youngest sister Angel is a nun with anxiety issues. Eldest sister Danni repairs guitars in New York City, and is the only Peck to have made it out of Baltimore. Fasten your seatbelts…it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Kathleen Warnock is a NYC-based playwright and editor, a graduate of UMBC (Go Retrievers!), and previously worked for both the Orioles and the Colts (that’s right, the COLTS). At Memorial Stadium. Her latest play, “That’s Her Way,” premieres in the NYFrigid Festival Feb. 22. Her full-length play,”Outlook” was presented by Emerging Artists Theater at the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in May 2012. Other plays include “Rock the Line,” produced by EAT (winner, Robert Chesley Award, published by United Stages), “Some Are People” (EAT in NY and in Dublin), which won the Arts & Letters Award; and “Grieving for Genevieve” (MITF, winner John Golden Award); and many other short plays in New York, London, and regionally. She is Playwrights Company Manager for Emerging Artists Theater, curates the Robert Chesley/Jane Chambers Playwrights Project for TOSOS, and hosts the reading series “Drunken!Careening! Writers!” at KGB the third Thursday of every month (since 2004). She is series editor of Best Lesbian Erotica (Cleis). She is a member of The Dramatists Guild. By day, she is Googly. www.kathleenwarnock.com @kwarnockny.
Ages: Adult Only – Genevieve is one of the funniest scripts ever written that happens to be rife with f-bombs.
Open June 6 – 30 Thursday Friday Saturday at 8, Saturday and Sunday at 3
July 15 – July 19 2013
Summer Camp
Ages 8 – 18
Playshacking Players will be exploring the archetypal story behind Cinderella. Students will create a performance based on their own interpretation.
Campers will spend the mornings doing theatre improvisational games and working with professional artisans to create props and costume pieces.
Lunch breaks will happen riverside. And the afternoons will be spent putting together a performance to be presented Friday afternoon, July 19.
September 2013
Gift of Forgotten Tongues
by Fengar Gael
Opens Sept 5-28 Thursday Friday Saturday at 8, Saturday and Sunday at 3**
(**No show the final Sunday. Join us at RIVERFEST that day!)
Fernelle Millmore, a brilliant young linguist-savant, is hired to translate the arcane speech of two patients undergoing an evolutionary metamorphosis, the shocking result of a genetic experiment gone awry. The linguist’s father believes that the two evolved “mutagens”, hold the visionary key to the future, and encourages his daughter to discover any revelations they have to offer. The daughter obeys, but her eventual attachment and isolation incites her father’s jealousy and jeopardizes his own humanity.
Language school.
Here languages learn how
To get used to foreign lips, to a dark palate,
To a laughing mouth and a crying mouth.
Languages learn and will never end,
Like yearnings.
Yehuda Amicha
“One language dies every fourteen days. By the next century nearly half of the languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin or Spanish.”
Russ Rymer
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ms. Gael has had her plays developed and produced at the New York Stage and Film Company, InterAct Theatre of Philadelphia, the Moxie Theatre of San Diego, New Jersey Repertory, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, Utah Shakespearean Festival, Seanachai Theatre of Chicago, the Kitchen Dog Theatre of Dallas, The Theatricum Botanicum Seedlings, the Tangent Theatre and AboutFace Ireland New Play Festival, and in New York City: MultiStages, The Abingdon Theatre Company, Collaborative Arts Project 1, Playwrights Gallery, and the Flux Theatre Ensemble. Ms. Gael is a recipient of the Playwrights First Award, The Craig Noel Award, as well as commissions from South Coast Repertory, New Jersey Repertory, the National New Play Network, and a fellowship from the California Arts Council. Most recently, The Usher’s Ball was given a showcase production at the Collaborative Arts Project 21’s Shop Theatre; The Cantor’s Tale was produced at the Hunger Artists Theatre Company in Fullerton, California; The Buttonhole Bandit was produced by the Edna Manley College in Kingston, Jamaica; The Gallerist was produced at the Rorschach Theatre in Washington D. C; and this October, Devil Dog Six was produced at The Venus Theatre in Laurel, Maryland; in November The Island of No Tomorrows was co-produced as a showcase by MultiStages and the Interart Development Series in New York; and in December, Devil Dog Six was given as staged reading at the Salt Lake Acting Company. Ms. Gael is currently a writer in residence at CAP 21 with the composer, Dennis McCarthy, continuing work on their musical, Soul on Vinyl.
Ages 16+ – Tongues will be choreographed by Maria Yaffe and promises an extra added visual element.
November – December 1st
No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn, or Emily Dickinson’s Sister
by Claudia Barnett
Opens Nov 7 – Dec 1 Thursday Friday Saturday at 8, Saturday and Sunday at 3** (**No shows on Thursday Nov 28 or Fri Nov 29).
Kate Stoddard murdered Charles Goodrich in 1873-after he told her they weren’t really married and had her evicted from his Brooklyn brownstone in a blizzard. Kate’s struggles to maintain her sanity and her identity, both before and after she shot her one true love three times in the head, are the subject of this play, which moves backwards and forwards through time and invokes a poetry of madness.
“When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs … I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor …”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“She had cultivated a romantic disposition by a liberal perusal of story papers and novels, and it is more than likely that cheap literature is the prime cause of all her woes and misfortunes.”
The Goodrich Horror: Being the full confession of Kate Stoddart, or Lizzie King
Claudia Barnett has developed two previous scripts, Feather and Another Manhattan, with Venus Theatre. She wrote No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn, or Emily Dickinson’s Sister as playwright-in-residence at Tennessee Repertory Theatre, and she wrote Witches Vanish as resident playwright at Stage Left Theatre in Chicago. A professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, she has also taught in France and the Czech Republic. Her book I Love You Terribly: Six Plays is published by Carnegie Mellon UP (2012).
Ages 16+ – 731 covers rich literary territory with an amazing physical element that has a kind of violence always brewing just under the surface.
Thanks for letting the girl talk.
Venus Theatre is a 501c3 nonprofit professional theatre company committed to setting flight to the voices of women and children with theatre for a lifetime.
