-THEATRE-
The insidious power of a lie takes center stage at the Wright-Dobie School for Girls in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, May 21–June 7 at the Good Shepard Methodist Church. When a student perceives she is being treated unfairly by the headmasters, she fabricates a lie about them—one that implies they might be (gasp!)…lesbians. Fearful that their children will be “inappropriately influenced,” parents begin to withdraw their children from the school. The controversy pushes relationships to the brink, tests assumptions, and challenges preconceived notions of the truth.
In The Geographical History of America — a new theatrical adaptation of lesbian literary icon Gertrude Stein’s humorously dizzying novel of the same name—Human Group plays with the ways we conceive, contextualize and perform our identities. Employing dance, music and digital photography in a communal experience for the Facebook age, The Horse Trade Group’s The Geographical History of America will begin in The KGB Bar and continue upstairs in The Red Room, May 14–23.
Now through May 16, HERE Arts Center presents the Downtown Urban Theater Festival, featuring 12 new works by a diverse, multicultural cross-section of playwrights including lesbian playwrights/performers Micia Mosely, Julia Steele Allen, Pamela Sneed and Patricia Ione Lloyd. Not only will DUTF foster the development of new works and promote diversity in the theatre, but it provides free educational events to bring the arts into the community and cultivates new audiences for theatre.
The Kraine Theater presents the world premiere of Thank You for Being a Friend: The Musical, May 24–July 12. This unauthorized musical parody inspired by the beloved TV sitcom The Golden Girls (rest in peace, Bea!) follows four women over 60 (Blanchette, the varicose-veined vixen; Dorthea, the brainy ball-buster; Roz, the lovable airhead; and Sophie, the wisecracking spitfire) who are spending their golden years together in a bungalow in Miami. But when gay pop superstar Lance Bass moves next door, his loud outdoor sex parties keep the quartet of cheesecake-loving retirees awake. The solution pits the gays against the girls at the annual Shady Oaks Retirement Home Talent Show: If the women win, then no more sex parties; if the gays garner top prize, the sassy seniors must serve as the party’s clean-up crew. Singing, dancing and hilarity ensue!
Waverly Writers and Wanderlust Productions are pleased to announce the upcoming production of Femme Feast, an evening of new material from women playwrights, directors and actors, dancers, and musicians, May 10–12 at the Manhattan Theatre Source. Femme Feast includes six new theatre pieces, including Laconia Koerner’s Truth or Dare, in which two women consider labels and attraction during a seductive game of truth or dare; and Laura Rohrman’s Monsters Ball, which finds women with surprising secret identities discussing marriage.
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