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Sept 30–Oct 30, Manhattan Theatre Source will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Estrogenius Festival, a celebration of female voices and one of New York City’s largest women’s arts festivals. The festival has grown into a five-week event including short plays, solo shows, music, visual art, dance and teen performances. Completely volunteer-run, estrogenius has provided more than 1,600 artists the chance to shine and is committed to providing opportunities to female artists (and male artists who create complex female characters) in a variety of disciplines ranging from the emerging to the seasoned professional.
In 1892 in a small New England town, "somebody" brutally murdered a well-to-do elderly man and his second wife with an axe. Lizzie Borden, their young daughter, was named the primary suspect, arrested and tried. Without any witnesses to the crime, she was acquitted, and the murder remains unsolved to this day. The rock musical Lizzie Borden, Sept 10–Oct 17 at The Living Theatre, spins the gory tale through the eyes of Lizzie, her older sister Emma, Lizzie’s close friend/lover Alice, and the housemaid Bridget. These four rockers tell the story of repression, patricide and two bloody murders through original songs, which reveal why Lizzie Borden may have taken up that axe in the first place.
The Ensemble Studio Theatre and Going to the River have lined up some of the most gifted women playwrights of color for a three-week presentation of The River Crosses Rivers, a two-series festival of short one-act plays, Sept 9–27 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Each evening will mix established playwrights like Kara Lee Corthron, Kia Corthron, Ruby Dee and J.E. Franklin with emerging playwrights.
Don’t miss Hollywood legend Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, a recounting of her true and intoxicating life story, at Studio 54 Sept 22–Jan 3. Told with the same wry wit that she poured into bestsellers like Postcards from the Edge, Wishful Drinking is an uproarious and sobering look at a Hollywood hangover. Born to celebrity parents, this tinseltown toddler lands among the stars when she’s cast in a little movie called Star Wars. But it isn’t all sweetness and light sabers as she battles addiction, depression, mental illness and that awful hyperspace hairdo.
And Sept 8–26 at The TGB Theatre, catch the world premiere production of Thunder Above, Deeps Below, a new play by A. Rey Pamatmat, directed by Pat Diamond. A trio of homeless kids begs on the streets of Chicago for money to bus westward. But as winter nears, a journey through coffee shops, drag clubs and mythic Lake Michigan waters brings change of a far queerer kind.
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