Asian American Playwrights in Her Rah! 2007! In Chicago
Two Asian American playwrights and one Asian playwright headline the selections for the Chicago Her-Rah! 2007! new playwrights festival for women writers.
Over 150 script submissions were received from around the world, with 17 top scripts selected to be seen at the festival, which takes place Thursday-Sunday, June 21-24 2007(daily schedule TBA), at Around The Coyote Arts Complex, 19351/2 North Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622.
Playwrights P. H. Lin (New York), Kathy Hsieh (Seattle) and Naranjargal Khashkhuu (Mongolia) will see their plays receive complete staged readings at Her-rah!
Every one of the selected plays will receive a complete staged reading using professional directors and actors from Chicago's theatre scene, and many movers and shakers from the Chicago theater scene will be in attendance throughout. Attendance for the ENTIRE four-day event---all 18 readings, the panel discussions, and TWO parties---is just $15! That's the cheapest date in Chi-town!
For more information about the event, including director assignments, discounted housing options, and the final daily schedule, stay tuned to www.internationalwomenplaywrights.org and www.aroundthecoyote.org .
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CHICAGO HER-RAH! 2007 FINAL PLAY PROGRAM, June 21-24, 2007 (Note: this program does yet not include panel discussions; details on panel discussions will be released shortly). NOTE: The daily schedule as to when each play will run is TBA:
SWEET GINGER, HOT AND BLUE, by P.H. Lin (New York, NY USA)
Ginger Chan wants to be an artist. Her immigrant father insists she become a doctor. Can the family survive, or will the combustible relationship between daughter and father destroy it? Complicating things are a 95-year-old Jewish woman, a female Buddha, and the
apparition-spirits of Ginger's mother and brother.
EMPTY FRIDGE, CARROTS, AND TOMATOES, by Naranjargal Khashkhuu
(Ulaanbaatar, MONGOLIA)
The meager contents of a refrigerator become the catalyst for a family conflict and a heated discussion on the true nature of love and marriage in Mongolian society.
EVERYBODY ELSE (IS FUCKING PERFECT) by Karen Jeynes (Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA)
Life is almost perfect in the suburban home of newlyweds Gavin and Cathy---a stable happy home and a good husband who is all she ever dreamed of. Enter Cathy's sister Traci, fresh from yet another disastrous relationship in London. Sparks fly in this wacky British expat comedy---especially when Traci begins an affair with toyboy Jared.
EVEN THE DIRT BLEEDS DOWN HERE, by Carolyn Nur Wistrand (Flint, MI USA)
This play is a folkloric drama of the Deep South that embraces the relationship between magic and everyday life, the hierarchy of skin tone, and the unity of themes in African-American life over the 20th century. The characters appear in 1904 and 1974 linked by fate, blood, and conjure.
HEADS, by EM Lewis (Santa Monica, CA USA)
A British Embassy worker, an American engineer, a network journalist and a freelance photographer are held captive in Iraq. As death draws close, each hostage must decide what he'll do to survive.
THE OLD, by Madelyn Sergel (Gurnee, IL USA)
Four old women telling the truth.
BOSWELL'S DREAMS, by Marie Kohler (Milwaukee, WI USA)
A comic-drama about the power of friendship, authenticity, and the written word, this play is grounded in the relationship between the 18th-century writers James Boswell and Samuel Johnson---but also leaps forward in time to the discovery of Boswell's personal journals by a female American graduate student in the 1950s.
PUSH, by Kristen Lazarian (Sherman Oaks, CA USA)
PUSH is the story of Brooke Gatwick, a vibrant Los Angeles art dealer with everything going for her. She has a loving husband, a solid group of friends, and a thriving career with money to burn. She also has deep insecurities about love and committment---and she's not the only one. Brooke's husband, Owen, is also in doubt of his wife's fidelity. But some tests are meant for failure, as Brooke and Owen soon discover. When love becomes a game for this couple, it's a "push" that leaves everyone devastated and the fate of one marriage hanging in the balance.
THEIR WINGS WERE BLUE, by Carmen Betancourt (Queens Village, NY USA)
Three characters escape from the Picasso painting The Tragedy. The museum curator who watches over the painting falls in love with one of them and gives chase.
BIRTH, by Karen Brody (Accord, NY USA)
This documentary play, based on interviews the playwright conducted with 118 women, is about modern childbirth in America.
INCOMING, by Kathy Anderson (Audubon, NJ USA)
A lesbian couple is having a baby in an unusual way, involving an inverse gravity board, a game of Red Rover, and an ex-lover trapped in a hospital bed.
THE NUCLEAR SECRET, by Lucia Verona (BUCHAREST, ROMANIA)
This play presnts the "huis clos", the confidential moment of the face-to-face discussion between the acting President of a country and the new President-elect. The acting President has to tell his successor the most important state secrets.
B4, by Kathy Hsieh (Seattle, WA USA)
Three couples. Three time periods. One NYC apartment. Japanese-American couple Grace and Jimmy are re-starting their lives after being interned in WWII. Walter Weissman and his wife Rachel struggle to break the blacklist in the 1950s. Christina desperately searches for her husband after he leaves for the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
MANHATTAN CASANOVA by Jenny Lyn Bader (New York, NY USA)
Dr. Charlotte Kaplan is a skeptical psychiatrist, attuned to trends, noticing that all of her patients and friends are falling in love even more quickly than usual. Could one man be responsible? A comedy about compulsive seduction.
GRIEVING FOR GENEVIEVE by Kathleen Warnock (Astoria, NY USA)
The Peck sisters and their mother gather in Baltimore for Delilah's wedding. A stroke of bad luck changes their plans, and the sisters have to take charge of the mother who's always tried to run their lives.
DARLIN', by Charlotte Samples (Torrance, CA USA)
The anticipated arrival of a government photographer to an "Okie" migrant worker camp in the midst of the Great Depression bring's forth a little girl's dream of having her picture taken in her deceased mother's one good, store-bought dress.
BOYS CLOTHES, by Vanda (New York, NY USA)
Two women fall in love with each other while their men are off fighting in the South Pacific in World War II.
