Venus Theatre

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Come see our final play of the Lucky 13: Free Your Mind [and let the girl talk] season.  And join us for a Shacky Chic Boutique open house on December 15.

731 NOW SHOWING

Venus Theatre presents the 2013 Season:

Lucky 13: Free your Mind

(and let the girl talk.)

Our final world premiere of the Lucky 13 Season runs November 7 - December 1!.Catch it if you can!



Audition process will be announced after plays are selected. 

Venus is a 501c3 nonprofit organization committed to setting flight to the voices of women and children with theatre for a lifetime.  All donations are tax deductible.

November - December 1st

No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn, or Emily Dickinson’s Sister

by Claudia Barnett

 

Venus Theatre is committed to setting flight to the voices of women and children with theatre for a lifetime. Ten years of producing in temporary rental spaces in DC, NYC, Baltimore, and Pennsylvania has led to a new vision. In April of 2006 Venus secured a storefront in Laurel, MD. The Venus Theatre Play Shack is home to the Company today.

Kate Stoddard murdered Charles Goodrich in 1873–after he told her they weren’t really married and had her evicted from his Brooklyn brownstone in a blizzard. Kate’s struggles to maintain her sanity and her identity, both before and after she shot her one true love three times in the head, are the subject of this play, which moves backwards and forwards through time and invokes a poetry of madness.

A note on the title:

Virginia Woolf imagined a sister for Shakespeare, an artist chastened for her gender and derided for her vision. Unable to act or write, she “killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads.” Claudia Barnett imagines a similarly metaphorical sister for Emily Dickinson. Kate Stoddard was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1847, about a hundred miles from the reclusive Amherst poet. Inspired by Woolf’s musings, Dickinson’s poetry, and Stoddard’s tragic life, No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn, or Emily Dickinson’s Sister asks: How might the same impulse lead one woman to poetry and another to murder?

Claudia Barnett teaches playwriting at Middle Tennessee State University. She has developed two previous scripts, Feather and Another Manhattan, with Venus Theatre. She wrote No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn, or Emily Dickinson’s Sister as playwright-in-residence at Tennessee Repertory Theatre, and she wrote Witches Vanish as resident playwright at Stage Left Theatre. Her book I Love You Terribly: Six Plays is published by Carnegie Mellon (2012).

“When … one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs … I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor …”

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 

“She had cultivated a romantic disposition by a liberal perusal of story papers and novels, and it is more than likely that cheap literature is the prime cause of all her woes and misfortunes.”

The Goodrich Horror: 

Being the full confession of Kate Stoddart, or Lizzie King

 Thanks for letting the girl talk.

Ages 16+ - 731 covers rich literary territory with an amazing physical element that has a kind of violence always brewing just under the surface.

Suggested meal before the show: Fajita, or anything that sizzles on a hot pan.

Tampico Tex-Mex Restaurant

42 Washington Blvd

Laurel, MD 20707

301.490.5300

 

 

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