Avant Bard proudly presents our inaugural Scripts in Play Festival, a springtime series of artistic “trial balloons,” works under consideration for future production. Below is a list of all the titles in our Festival:
Saturday, March 26, 7:30 pm: The Good Devil (In Spite of Himself)
by Mario Baldessari and Tyler Herman
Directed by Tyler Herman
In this rambunctious, ribald farce, a troupe of commedia dell’arte players are bedeviled by a royal decree that they must never speak dialogue on stage. Baldessari and Herman take a flying leap off historical fact and deliver a riotous new comedy about art and censorship.
Saturday, April 2 and 9, 7:30 pm: TAME.
by Jonelle Walker
After the tragic death of her girlfriend, Catherine returns home from college and sinks into a funk, and her fundamentalist parents enlist a fiery young minister to fix her up. With echoes of Taming of the Shrew, Walker delves into a world of beatniks and housewives to tell an edgy tale of a woman on the edge.</span></span>
Saturday, April 16 and 23, 7:30 pm: Natasha and the Wolf
by Mary Resing
<span style="background-color:transparent">History and fiction collide as Resing (author of Helen Hayes Award winner Visible Language) brings to life the creation of Peter and the Wolf. When Soviet-era director Natasha Sats commissions Sergei Prokofiev to compose a symphonic tale for children, little does she know the fable will foretell the turmoil about to knock at her door.</span>
Thursday, March 31, 7:30 pm: Dido, Queen of Carthage
by Rebecca Wahls
Directed by Rebecca Wahls
Four-hundred years ago, Christopher Marlowe told the tragic love story of proud Queen Dido and Trojan warrior Aeneas. Now inspired by Marlowe, Wahls brings the lovers’ fierce passion to life.
Friday, April 1, 7:30 pm: First Citizen
by Katherine Clair and Anna Lathrop
Directed by Kelsey Mesa
<span style="background-color:transparent">Coriolanus depicts history through the eyes of powerful royals—but what if ordinary citizens told their story? Clair and Lathrop subvert Shakespeare’s tragedy, taking the commoners’ point of view on the whirlwind of events that shook the foundation of Rome.</span>
Friday, April 8, 7:30 pm: Miranda
by James Still
Directed by Elena Velasco
In this haunting thriller, an elusive CIA operative finds herself undercover in Yemen directing a production of Othello with teenagers--or trying to, since the only teenage actor she can find has grave doubts about all of the characters in the play. Against a backdrop of high-stakes international intrigue, a mind-bending existential crisis unfolds.
Sunday, April 17, 7:30pm: Lear
by Edward Bond
Directed by Anne Nottage
<span style="background-color:transparent">Limitless power leads to bloody consequences in Bond’s visceral, poetic retelling of Shakespeare's epic tragedy. With references to atrocities of the 20th century, this 1971 epic is scarily prescient and as chilling as ever.</span>
Thursday, April 14, 7:30 pm: The Green Cockatoo
by Arthur Schnitzler
Directed by Tom Prewitt and Bill Toscano
<span style="background-color:transparent">Site-specific theatre meets reality entertainment in this mind-bending one-act set in a Parisian dive bar/cabaret on the eve of the French Revolution. Bored aristocrats seeking cheap thrills flock to rub shoulders with unemployed actors impersonating criminals and revolutionaries, and it’s all good, wine-soaked sport—until suddenly and irrevocably, it’s not.</span>
Friday, April 15, 7:30 pm: Presumed Dead
by Angela de Azevado (English translation by Catherine Larson, based on the Spanish edition by Valerie Hegstrom)
Directed by Kari Ginsburg
<span style="background-color:transparent">The translating team that gave us Friendship Betrayed reclaims a 17th-century comedy written by a mysterious woman of the Portuguese court. A high-spirited yarn about armadas and war, royal marriages, cross-dressing and mistaken identities, this new-old play is as riotously funny as it is historically fascinating</span>
Thursday, April 21, 7:30 pm: Compleat Female Stage Beauty
by Jeffrey Hatcher
Directed by Kevin Finkelstein
<span style="background-color:transparent">At a time when only actors were allowed on the English stage, London’s most celebrated leading lady was a man. But when a maverick actress persuades the king to allow actual women to perform, the star gets huffy and things turn ugly. Hatcher’s dishy comedy tells all.</span>
Friday, April 22, 7:30 pm: Emilie La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight
by Lauren Gunderson
Directed by Quill Nebeker
<span style="background-color:transparent">Although history remembers her mainly as Voltaire’s lover, Emilie du Châtelet was also a scientific genius and one of the 18th century’s most original minds. In Gunderson’s antic theatrical reconstruction, this resurrected heroine must choose between head and heart, intellect and love. </span>
SPECIAL EVENT
Saturday, April 23, 2 pm: The 296 Project: Veterans Acting Out
<span style="background-color:transparent">Directed by Tom Prewitt</span>
Former U.S. servicemembers share their experiences of war, homecoming, and reacclimation to civilian life, contrasting them with some of Shakespeare’s most powerful depictions of soldiers and their loved ones in his own lifetime.
