2020

Freedom vs. Family

As part of UHeights ( University Heights) Theatre Alliance, ACT theatre in conjunction with ESE TEATRO, presents an online live reading of Shoe, by Maisela Trevino Orta. The play examines the family dynamics and gender roles within a dysfunctional Mexican American family led by a matriarch, who manipulates her grown children to remain under her roof, as a way to deal with the enormous grief, created when her spouse abandoned her and her children twelve years ago. Drawing inspiration from the nursery rhyme “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe”, the play creates an atmosphere of confinement and constriction, as the protagonist yearns for a life outside of the family’s double-wide trailer in Texas

Shoe,A live reading by Marisela Trevino Orta, Sunday Nov. 15, 5 pm. Tickets https://order.acttheatre.org/shoe/11715?mc_cid=f72716da9e&mc_eid=454f96f273

For more information about the playwright see: https://newplayexchange.org/users/148/marisela-trevi%C3%B1o-orta

Evan’s Virtual Variety Show

The November Variety show features a variety performer who performs globally & on cruise ships, a magician who has performed all over the country, and an aerialist who is so good that she now teaches other aerialists! Post-show talkback with the performers, ask them anything you like!

Evan’s Virtual Variety Show, online Sunday Nov. 12- 2pm.

https://youtu.be/Ozhf3OQhtro

If you are ready for a post-election, mid-pandemic break, the Federal Way Performing Arts and Event Center may have the

Mustard Seeds- The Underground Railroad-not everybody made it to Canada!

University Heights Center is hosting several small theatre online productions among them Mustards Seeds, produced by Pork Filled Players, a co-production with The Hansberry Project: Mustard Seeds, by Michelle Tyrene Johnson, is directed by acclaimed director Valerie Curtis-Newton,

Set in the contemporary world, “Mustard Seeds” unfolds when researchers camping out on the bank of the Missouri River encounter the unborn souls, who did not make it to the Wyandotte County, Kansas stop of the Underground Railroad.

Mustard Seeds Produced by Pork Filled Productions. Sat Nov. 14 -7 pm. Tickets:https://pork-filled.ticketleap.com/mustard-seeds/dates/Nov-14-2020_at_0700PM

Historical Recreation of the Emmett Till Murder

The play, the Carolyn Bryant Project re-creates one of the greatest miscarriages of justice perpetrated on African Americans in the Jim Crow South.
Emmett “Bobo” Till, a 14-year old Chicago youth, walked into a store in Money, Mississippi to purchase 5-cents worth of bubble gum from Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year old, white mother of two. Within a few days of this interaction, Till’s beaten and bloated body was found tied to a cotton-gin fan in a shallow part of the Tallahatchie River. Bryant’s husband Roy and his brother JW Milan would be acquitted of Till’s murder by an all-white male jury, only to confess to the murder a year later in a Look Magazine article.
What happened in those fateful minutes shared between Bryant and Till in the store? Creators Nataki Garrett and Andrea LeBlanc compile historical transcripts, video imagery, and re-imagined encounters to expose what lies beneath the exchange between Carolyn Bryant and Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, in a play called The Carolyn Bryant Projecté

The Carolyn Bryant Project. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Nov-9 til Nov 22,
Free-online: centerfornewperformance.org/streaming.

The talented writer Ann Petry came to Harlem from Connecticut in 1938 and joined the Harlem Renaissance movement. Although she

Like the BBC’s Book at Bedtime- A short story read aloud

As part of The Seagull Project’s Great Souls: An Evening of Short Stories and Performance, Claudine Mboligikpelan Nako read Langston Hughes’ One Friday Morning. Written in 1941, it recounts the experience of disappointed hopes, due to the rising expectations, caused by the Great Migration. In many ways the experience of the high school student in the story, is a metaphor for the Great Migration.

Spring Awakening, The winner of eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, will be livestreamed until Nov. 7 by Capitol City Theatre Company. The landmark musical, with lyrics by Duncan Sheik and music by Steven Sater, is an electrifying fusion of morality, sexuality and rock and roll that has been exhilarating audiences across the nation like no other musical in years.

Spring Awakening (Frühlings Erwachen in German) was originally written in 1890-91 but not performed until 1906, when the famous avant garde director Max Reinhardt directed it at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. As a result of its controversial subject matter: the devastating effects of adolescent sexual ignorance and repression, teen-age suicide, child abuse, and other taboo subjects in the early 20th Century, it was often banned and censored. It was also a harbinger of Expressionism and modernism in theater.

Wedekind was writing at a time when Freud was writing about psychoanalysis, infantile sexuality, the role of sexual repression in mental health, the interpretation of dreams and other taboo theories, which threatened the social order of 19th Century bourgeois society. Other visionaries such as Oscar Wilde and the French symbolist poets were undermining cultural norms as well.
Spring Awakening’s exposition is swift, a 14 school-girl Wendla, is trying on a short skirt, when her mother tells her that the “stork” has brought another baby for the older married sister, and then forbids Wendla from wearing a short skirt.

Well into puberty, Wendla begs her mother to tell her where babies come from, but the mother says they just come from loving one’s husband a lot, leaving Wendla extremely vulnerable for sexual exploitation.
The plot weaves a web around the theme of sexual repression and ignorance, as both boys and girls in the provincial town try to deal with sexuality, without any concrete knowledge of what is happening to them or their bodies. The adults around them are generally nasty, repressed, frightened and authoritarian. There is an unwanted pregnancy, a botched abortion, suicide, domestic violence, as well as parental and school abuse.

All performances take place at the Capitol City Theater Companies Studio Located at 1742 N 48th Street in Lincoln, Nebraska and Streamed Nationwide through a partnership with Music Theater International, but will be livestreamed.

Spring Awakening, Until Nov. 7 at 7:30 pm Ticketshttps://www.capitolcity.live/tickets

“Men in this town were born with mouths that can right wrongs with a few words. Why are you too timid to speak?”

Executed for a murder she did not commit, young widow Dou Yi vows that if she is innocent, snow will fall in midsummer and a catastrophic drought will strike. Three years later, a businesswoman visits the parched, locust-plagued town to take over an ailing factory. When her young daughter is tormented by an angry ghost, the new factory owner must expose the injustices Dou Yi suffered before the curse destroys every living thing.

In the foreword to the play’s 2018 edition, Jo Palazuelos-Krukowski writes, “Snow in Midsummer’s Dou Yi…refuses false peace, and she obviates easy forgetting. In a society where the powerful use the weak to their own ends, she unmasks realities her community is too blind and too afraid to acknowledge.”

Based on the classical Chinese drama by Guan Hanqing, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s modern adaptation, directed by Desdemona Chiang with a stellar cast including Richard Nguyen Sloniker and one of Seattle’s most beloved actresses, Kathy Hsieh, is a performance you will not soon forget.

Snow in Midsummer, Harlequin Productions. Tonight, Sunday October 18.7:30 PST Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri. 7:30 PST thru Oct. 23

Tickets: https://harlequinproductions.org/show/snow-in-midsummer/