New York, NY -- 365 WOMEN A YEAR: A PLAYWRITING PROJECT involves over 400 women who signed on to write one or more one-acts about extraordinary women in both past and present history. The project’s goal is to write women back into the social consciousness as well as empower and promote female playwrights around the globe.
The New York City Branch of 365 Women involves fifteen playwrights in a staged reading event with plays approximately 10 minutes long. They will be presented on April 11 at The Sheen Center, 18 Bleecker Street, New York, NY. There will be a wide range of women explored over the evening. This full program, produced by Cate Cammarata, is divided into the following three groups:
Group A 6:30-7:30 pm
Chisolm Trail by Olga Humphrey (featuring Shirley Chisolm)
Beatrix in the Shadows by D. Lee Miller (featuring Beatrix Potter)
Olympic Games by Cynthia L. Cooper (featuring Wilma Rudolph)
The Past is Still Ahead by Sophia Romma (featuring Marina Tsvetaeva)
Blood Ties by Michael angel Johnson (featuring Edmonia Wildfire Lewis and Lydia M. Child)
Group B 7:45 – 8:45 pm
We Were Very Merry by Penny Jackson (featuring Edna Vincent Millay)
Squeezing Papayas by Robin Rice Lichtig (featuring Sasha Montenegro)
Condi on Ice by Libby Emmons (featuring Condoleezza Rice)
Georgia Makes a Scene by Susan Shafer (featuring Georgia O’Keeffe)
Box of Lies by Karin Diann Williams (featuring Anais Nin)
Group C 9:00-10:00 pm
Temperance by Gina DeMarco (featuring Victoria Woodhull)
Caster by Kat Mustatea (featuring Caster Semenya)
Truth and Justice in an Elevator by Erin Moughon (featuring Judge Sonia Sotomayor)
Dying is an Art by Kendra Augustin (featuring Sylvia Plath)
Hollywood Butterfly by Barbara Kahn (featuring Butterfly McQueen)
This program is part of the SWAN Day festivities.
For reservations, please go to http://tinyurl.com/pcg263m
Contact:
D. Lee Miller
365womenayearny@gmail.com
Casting "Carte Blanche," a ten-minute play for Midtown Madness Play Festival portraying a former washed up screen siren who fancies that she is Blanche Dubois from "A Streetcar Named Desire". Searching for a Young German Vacationer on the prowl.
March 2015, a ten-minute play for Midtown Madness Play Festival portraying a former washed..
Sophia Romma is not your ordinary playwright. She is, rather, in a class all by herself. While some of her work conforms (slightly) to more conventional models (I think, for example of her elegiac portrait of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, The Past is Still Ahead. (Which I have also had the pleasure of directing)
But it is with a play like That Queer Blind Silence that Romma’s enigmatic brilliance can be seen with full-on flashing lights.
I say enigmatic in the sense of a mathematical paradox or a puzzle. There are many moving parts, a kaleidoscope of actions, motives and allusions that only reveal themselves when one approaches the text with newly opened eyes. Pay attention to what is there, not what you think may be there!
At first glance, one could be forgiven (partially) for mistaking this play as a variation on the old "inmates running the asylum" theme, but that reading runs the risk of missing the play's ethos entirely, for Romma’s asylum is a battlefield of elemental impulses both embodied and inferred, each and every one demanding our attention. Romma's characters and situations do not so much evolve as they explode and the audience is advised to take cover! At times it seems to SHOUT: “This is a crisis; why are you just standing there?”
In Romma’s world that Venn diagram of sexual, intellectual and spiritual chaos finds expression in the rise of Vladimir Putin. In many respects, the play feels prescient as the issues raised by the Sochi Olympics back in 2014 have only grown more urgent and grotesque. Putin may be a monster, but he is a monster of our own, perhaps unintended, invention; like a poisonous gas he fills the rupturing fault lines of our dark, discordant worlds. He fills the places we refuse to acknowledge; a malignant expansion super-charged by the denials and conflicts each and every one of us harbours.
But the madhouse is not a metaphor for a world peopled with tabloid celebrity, even if it’s occupants (Paul Robson, Edward Snowden, Johnny Weir, Masha Gesson etc) certainly fill that bill. I suggest instead that Romma offers us a world that is beyond metaphor; that its “is-ness” cannot be reduced to a play of symbols. The here-and-now presented by That Queer Blind Silence is not so much a mirror of the world as it is the world and the world, alive with all it’s contradictions, delusions and inchoate desires is not a pretty sight.
The challenge in producing this play is to be sure and give it the oxygen it needs; let every line and every action breath into the life required and you will begin to find that the play’s seemingly disparate, even irreconcilable parts, come together, illuminating each other in ways that may remain evasive to even the closest of readings.
BIO Line
John Farrell is an Irish writer-director-broadcaster who has staged many plays and events in both Ireland and New York across a career spanning nearly half-a-century.
PROFESSIONAL THEATRE WOMEN'S AWARD CEREMONY GILDER/COIGNEY Theatre award was presented to Patricia Ariza from Colombia by the LPTW's International committee and Co-Chair, Sophia Romma.
On Wednesday October 29th, 2014, LA MAMA Theatre in association with The O'Neill Film and Theatrical Foundation and LPTW presented "Change-Making Theatre, a performance and panel event on the Theatre work of 21 women from 19 countries nominated in the 2014 Gilder/Coigney award. Americas Society during the Interview with Miriam Colon and awardee Patricia Ariza. At The League of Professional Women Theatre, with Joan Pottlitzer and Adriana Sananes.
Polaris North Theatre Collective Presents "Carte Blanche" for "Chance Acts Series." This short play, written by Sophia Romma and directed by celebrated Irish stage director, John M. Farrell, presents a tale of a popular Broadway actress--her delirious fantasy world of escapism as her searching soul battles against the brutal reality of an aging body and a fading mind.
Garden of the Avant-Garde Film and Theatrical Foundation in Collaboration with the League of Professional Women in Theatre Present the Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Awards Panel with international award nominees for best theatrical productions (circa October, 2014).
How did I respond to The Past Is Still Ahead, written and directed by Sophia Romma, at the Midtown International Theatre Festival? Let me count the ways: I thought it was brave, moving, intense, smart, overdone, kinda laughable, and kinda wonderful. Mostly, I admired it. I admired the work and love that went into it. I admired the sheer commitment of it.
But let's back up a bit. The Past Is Still Ahead gives us Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, exiled in Siberia after a life of terrible loss, much of it at the hands of the Soviets (One daughter starved to death; the other was arrested; her husband was arrested and executed.)
Now on the verge of suicide, Tsvetaeva is examining her life, loves, and work. In a way, she is justifying herself to us, the audience, explaining her treatment of her children, her mistrust of her mother, her affairs, her life, her devotion to her writing above all else. She tells us stories, she corresponds with Rainer Maria Rilke, she argues with her mother, she is visited by an apparition billed as "Mariana's muse and spiritual alter-ego" (but who comes across as death), she is interrogated by the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB).
Romma has used some of Tsvetaeva's and Rilke's writing, supplemented with much of her own, often written in more or less successful rhyming triplets. She has directed the show with a rarely remitting intensity, and watching it can feel like being pummeled by a tsunami of words. She has guided her cast to brave and impassioned--but occasionally overdone--performances.
But, and this is a big but, the show is 100% successful at depicting the sheer insane fire of a brilliant woman who has had everything taken from her, except the power to end her own life.
While the show is all about words, words, and words, Romma uses other art forms well. The muse/death character speaks only once (a mistake, I think; she shouldn't have spoken at all) but instead communicates through beautiful wordless singing. And Tsvetaeva's lover Sophia Parnoc interacts with her via a wonderful, expressive solo tango.
The cast is somewhat uneven. Alice Bahlke as Tsvetaeva gives the role her all, and she is dynamic, often effective, and always impressive (the sheer work of learning that part is daunting), though a little more subtlety would have been welcome. Tosh Marks is perhaps miscast as Rilke and various other men in Tsvetaeva's life; his personality and presence don't quite gel. Liora Michelle sang beautifully as the muse/death; Nuria Martinez Mendez managed to provide a full human being through her dance, which she also choreographed; and Bettina Bennett was wholly convincing as Tsvetaeva's mother.
The show, which is being performed in a theatre the size of a large studio apartment, uses the space well, with excellent set, costume, sound, and lighting design by, respectively, Inna Bodner, Anastasia Glebova, Dmitri German, and Gennadi Birushov.
I'd like to end this with a word of thanks to all the festivals in New York that give opportunities for shows like this one to have a life. At an hour long, and with a limited potential audience, The Past Is Still Ahead doesn't fit into the existing models of commercial and nonprofit theatre. But it is a compelling piece that deserves to be seen.
http://showshowdown.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-past-is-still-ahead.html
In "The Past Is Still Ahead" by Sophia Romma, one of Russia's most ill-fated and controversial cult poets of the twentieth century, Marina Tsvetaeva, revisits the tumultuously tragic and sexy events of her life--just before she succumbs to "suicide" at the hands of the Soviet Secret Police in 1941 while exiled in Siberia. The play will be presented by Midtown InterNational Theatre Festival on July 23, 27 and 28 at The Jewel Box Theater, 312 W. 36th Street, 4th floor, NYC, directed by François Rochaix. Check out a first look below!
The six-character play is written in English by the Russian-born NY playwright Sophia Romma (www.sophiamurashkovsky.com ) and is based on a monologue by Israeli playwright Oded Be' eri.
"The Past Is Still Ahead" premiered at the legendary Mayakovsky Academic Art Theater in Moscow on April 25, 2007, directed by François Rochaix (of Théâtre de Carouge, Geneva) and Yuri Joffe (of the Mayakovsky Academic Art Theater). Its American debut was presented by The Past is Stilll Ahead, Inc. at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2007, directed by François Rochaix and Ms. Romma for a two-week run. That production starred YeLena Romanova, a Russian actress of theater and film, as the famous poet and featured other actors from the Mayakovsky Academic Art Theater. Subsequently, the piece was presented at Théâtre de Carouge in Geneva (2008), at the JCC in Manhattan in 2008, at the Millennium Theatre in Brooklyn, NY, at the Pushkin House in London, England and at Oxford University in 2009. This is the play's first performance with an all-American cast.
The actors will be Alice Bahlke as Marina Tsvetaeva, Inna Leytush as Marina Tsvetaeva's Mother in the afterlife and Bettina Bennett as the poet's Mother in her youth, Tosh Marks as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Grant Morenz as the Soviet NKVD Officer who interrogates Tsvetaeva, Liora Mishelle as Marina's Muse, and Nuria Martinez as Sophia Parnok. Costume design is by Anastasia Glebova (of the Mayakovsky Academic Art Theatre). Lighting design is by Genadi Birushov from Russia. Sound design is by Dmitri German and set design is by award-winner Inna Bodner.
Photos by Jonathan Slaff
Tosh Marks, Alice Bahlke
Alice Bahlke
Poster for a sweet word of advice by Inna Bodner