Staged Play Readings 2012-13
The Lark by
Lillian Hellman and Jean Anouilh
directed by Bernie Jablonski
The story of a simple girl who became an inspired warrior and then was tried by the church—but there have been several ways of telling it. Anouilh’s way, and Miss Hellman’s, is to try to tell the story from two viewpoints. One of them is how we look at the tale now as a piece of history, with our knowledge of how the girl’s blundering captors unwittingly created a martyr who became forever a symbol of courage and faith. The other viewpoint has been to try to imagine what it must have been like to be Joan herself.
The Year of Magical Thinking 2012 by Joan Didion
directed by Mary Ellen Fawk
From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Seagull 2012 by Anton Chekov in a new translation by Libby Appel
Directed by Warren Sampson
You can’t always get what you want.
On a 19th-century Russian lakeside estate, the magic of summer evokes passion in three generations of self-doubting artists. Masha pines for the young writer Kostya, but Kostya yearns for the aspiring actress Nina, who is infatuated with the older novelist Trigorin. Trigorin “loves” both Nina and theatre diva Irina. Irina decidedly loves herself. And everyone aches for recognition, as artists and as human beings. With material not in earlier stage versions, Appel delivers a sexy, full-blooded adaptation of Chekhov’s heartbreaking and comic exposé of unfulfilled desire.