Venus Theatre

Venus Theatre presents the 2013 Season:

Lucky 13: Free your Mind (and let the girl talk.)

The box office is OPEN.

April 2013

Following Sarah

by Rich Espey

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. Julias 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

usSo 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. Richs 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.
Suggested meal before the show: Margarita Pizza

at Salute Restaurante Italiano. -   504 Main Street  Laurel, MD 20707  -  301-490-6919

saluteitaliano@gmail.com  -  www.saluteristorante.com  -  (tell Mireim and Kass that Deb sent you!)

Open April 4 - 28 Thursday Friday Saturday at 8, Saturday and Sunday at 3

June 2013

GRIEVING FOR GENEVIEVE

by Kathleen Warnock

Late one summer in a Baltimore working-class neighborhood somewhere in the mid-90s, the three Peck sisters reunite wit

h their chain-smoking mother Genevieve, a retired nurse. Middle sister Delilah is getting married f

or 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...its 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 Cesley/Jane Chamber 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.
Suggested meal before the show: A Pitcher of Margaritas. or Limeade.
Tampico Tex-Mex Restaurant
42 Washington Blvd
Laurel, MD 20707
301.490.5300

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 gather to explore the archetypal story behind Cinderella.  Students will create a performance based on their own interpretations of the Cinderella tale.  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 (weather permitting).  And th eafternoons will be spent putting together a performance to be presented Friday afternoon, July 19.

September 2013

Gift of Forgotten Tongues

by Fengar Gael

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 linguists father believes that the two evovled "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 fathers jealousy and jeopardizes his own humanity

Lanugage 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 Amichai

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

M

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 Jersy 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 About Face 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 Ushers Ball was given a shocase production at the Collaborative Arts Project 21;s Shope 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, DC; and last 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 a staged reading at the Salt Lake Actin 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.
Suggested meal before the show: Calamari

at Salute Restaurante Italiano. -   504 Main Street  Laurel, MD 20707  -  301-490-6919

saluteitaliano@gmail.com  -  www.saluteristorante.com  -  (tell Mireim and Kass that Deb sent you!)

Open Sept 5 - 28 Thursday Friday Saturday at 8, Saturday and Sunday at 3**
(**No show the final Sun. Please join us at Riverfest!)

November - December 1st

No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn or Emily Dickinsons Sister

by Claudia Barnett

Kate Stoddard murdered Charles Goodrich in 1873 after he told her they weren't really married and had her evicted from his Brooklyn borwnstone in a blizzard.  Kates struggles to main tain her sanity and her identity, noth before and after she shot her one true love three times in te head, are the subject of this play, which moves backwards and forwards through time and invokes a poetry of madness.

Note on the title:  Virginia Woolf imagined a sister for Shakespeare, an artist chastened for her gender and derided for her vision.  Unable to act or write, she "killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads." Claudia barnett imagines a similarly metaphorical sister for Emily Dicinson.  Kate Stoddard was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1847, about a hundred miles from the reclusive Amhers poet.  Inspired by Woolf's musings, Dicinson's petry, and Stoddard's tragic life, No. 731 Degraw-street, Brookly, or Emily Dicininson's Sister asks:  How might the same impulse lead one woman to poetry and another to murder?

Ages 16+ - 731 covers rich literary territory with an amazing physical element that has a kind of violence always brewing 

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 Bront who dashed her brains out on the moor

Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones 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 Dicinsons Sister as a playwright-in-residence at Tennessee Reperatory Theatre, and she wrote Witches Vanish as a 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 Millon 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.

Suggested meal before the show: Fajita, or anything that sizzles on a hot pan.

Tampico Tex-Mex Restaurant

42 Washington Blvd

Laurel, MD 20707

301.490.5300

Open Nov 7 - Dec 1 Thursday Friday Saturday at 8, Saturday and Sunday at 3**
(**No shows on Thursday Nov 28 or Fri Nov 29)

Thanks for letting the girl talk.

Venus Theatre is committed to setting flight to the voices of women and children with theatre for a lifetime. Ten years of producing in temporary rental spaces in DC, NYC, Baltimore, and Pennsylvania has led to a new vision. In April of 2006 Venus secured a storefront in Laurel, MD. The Venus Theatre Play Shack is home to the Company today.



Audition process will be announced after plays are selected. 

Venus is a 501c3 nonprofit organization committed to setting flight to the voices of women and children with theatre for a lifetime.  All donations are tax deductible.

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