January 2008
by Linda Suzuki
BABY DYKES, STRAIGHT CHICKS, and ACTRESSES
ORDINARY MOURNING
OH...GOD...YES!"

In 2004, Venus Theatre produced the first play by a surprised and grateful local writer named Linda Suzuki.  Since then, Louisiana State University ( Baton Rouge , LA ), Bloody Unicorn Theater Company ( Tucson , AZ ), Baltimore Playwrights Festival ( Baltimore , MD ), Bailiwick Repertory Theatre ( Chicago , IL ), Stage Q ( Madison , WI ), Green Light Productions ( New York , NY ), 20% Theatre Company ( Chicago , IL ), and Another Country Productions ( Boston , MA ) have performed Linda's work and she's still surprised -- and grateful to Deb and Co.
 
Baby Dykes, Straight Chicks, and Actresses
There are the three kinds of women that every smart lesbian avoids.  So how come a smart lesbian like Skye is always in such trouble?
 
Ordinary Mourning
Sunny is just getting started with her mourning.  Everyone else is just getting tired of it.
 
Oh...God...Yes!
Because the apartment walls are so thin, Lainey thinks she knows everything there is to know about the sex life of the couple next door.  She’s wrong.

February
by Reina Hardy
JUVENILLA
ERRATICA

Reina Hardy is a playwright with credits in Chicago, New York, Los
Angeles, and Muncie, Indiana.  She is co-founder and director of The Viola Project, a Shakespeare performance workshop for girls ages 10-16. Reina once tried, and failed, to see a show in every Chicago Fringe venue during the course of a year.

JUVENILIA
"Juvenilia" deals with the tender, heroic, stupid, elaborate imagined
worlds that many supposed ordinary people spent half their lives in as children, and abandoned as they grew.  So what happened to them?  Are they still there?  Do they miss us?

ERRATICA

Professor Samantha Stafford is trying to write a book on Shakespeare. But one of her students is madly in love with her, her publicist wants her to do something more commercial, and she is persistently haunted by an entity claiming to be the ghost of Christopher Marlow.  Meanwhile,  Jack Hooper, a librarian who just might be a match for Dr. Stafford, has lost a prized manuscript to a mysterious thief.   It's all connected.  But how?

March
by Julianne Homokay**
BREAKING THE BELL JAR
plays on poems by Sylvia Plath

JULIANNE HOMOKAY, a graduate of the MFA Playwriting program at UNLV, is a Los Angeles-based playwright, librettist, lyricist and performer.  Recent productions and readings include "Cottonmouth" at the Blank Theatre Company (Los Angeles,) "Favors" at Bloomington Playwrights' Project, and a collaboration with composer Ron Barnett, "Around the World in Eighty Days," at the Fulton Theatre (Lancaster, PA.)  Special thanks to Adam Kinsinger and the William Inge Center for the Arts for aiding in the development of "Breaking the Bell Jar," and to longtime colleague and general kick-ass babe Deb Randall.

BREAKING THE BELL JAR was first developed and read at the William Inge Center for the Arts (Peter Ellenstein, Artistic Director,) as part of a residency in the Fall of 2007.  Featuring three actors playing multiple roles, this collection of short plays explores themes commonly found  in the poetry and prose of Sylvia Plath.

April
by Mary Steelsmith
ISAAC, I AM

Mary Steelsmith has been writing since her high school days in Boise, Idaho. Her plays have won numerous awards, including THE OLD MAN AND THE SEED, which brought Mary to Singapore for its Asia premiere.  "Isaac, I Am" won the Helford Prize at Jacksonville University in Florida.
 
"Isaac, I am"
Set in the world of seductive cyber chat rooms and instant messaging, Angela finds herself torn between a budding "real life" romance and a darker online relationship with a family seemingly bent on its own destruction. As she struggles to come to terms with her own feelings of insecurity and loneliness, she is simultaneously pulled deeper into a bizarre cyberspace by the perplexing and emotionally elusive family of Joshua, his younger sister Katie and their obsessive father, Isaac. Eventually, Angela's dual worlds of reality and "virtu-ality" begin to blur together, until her computer life threatens to devour her whole.

May
by Ms. Chris Shaw Swanson**
Tophet Point

Chris Swanson is an award-winning playwright whose works have been produced throughout the country.  Her play THE GROWTH was recently chosen by Smith & Kraus to be included in their anthology The Best 10-Minute Plays 2008, 3 or more actors.  A member of the Dramatist Guild of America, she lives in Westerville, Ohio, with her husband John and twin sons Eric and John.  

Fed up with her middle-to-upper-middle class classic suburban subdivision existence, Sara embarks on a search for a more meaningful, less materialistic life.  Who would have thought that giving up air conditioning could be so difficult?  TOPHET POINT was a finalist for the 2007 Arthur W. Stone Award.

-summer off-

September
by Carolyn Gage**+
THE AMAZING YAMASHITA AND THE GOLDDIGGERS OF 2009

Carolyn Gage is a playwright, performer and director whose work foregrounds lesbians and survivors in plays that electrify audiences.  She takes risks that few contemporary theatres are willing to share, and, if productions of her work are hard to come by, her fans cherish them all the more.

The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Golddiggers of 2009 is “the transnational, post-modern magic show of the millennia!”  The A-Mazing Yamashita promises to levitate a woman, cut a woman in two, and disappear thirteen million women –  all through the wizardry of modern pharmaceuticals, the mesmerism of sexual objectification, and the economic hocus-pocus of the Great Cabinet of GATT.  An interactive play, Yamashita blurs the distinction between performance and reality, entertainment and exploitation, compelling each member of the audience to draw that line for herself. 

10 am reading...
October
by Lisa Bonita Bridgens
ON THIN ICE

Lisa Bonita Bridgens is an emerging playwright living in Boston, MA. She attended Foothill Theater Conservatory in California and is currently a Research Intern at Boston Theatre Works. Her one-act play "The Party" is making its premier in New York in February of 2008.
 
Mary Jacobs has brought healing and hope to millions through her evangelical ministry. But, she has a secret that could rob her not only of her ministry millions, but her life as well. Is Mary a fake and a fraud, or is she blessed with a divine gift?

November
by Claudie Haas
THREE SISTERS FROM QUEENS

Claudia Haas has been writing plays for fifteen years after a long stint as an actress.  She works with five publishers and her plays (mostly for youth) have seen over 400 productions world-wide.  2007 has been very kind with her heartfelt play By Candlelight being honored at the Bonderman Symposium and as the winner of the 2007 Aurand Harris Play Writing Contest.

During an evening of saying good-bye to Tess's recently deceased husband, three elderly sisters find themselves sorting out the scattered threads of their relationship to one another.  The Italian saying that "blood is thicker than water" never rang with such resonance.  Old resentments flare up as the sisters rediscover each other and their earlier bonds.

December
by Gina Stewart
A SLICE OF HER LIFE

Gina Stewart, a graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia, came to Playwrighting late in life (30ish), although her younger sister had performed in plays in school. It just never dawned on Gina that someone had to sit down and write what the actors were saying! After writing several plays, she became a drama teacher for middle schoolers and sometimes high schoolers.
 
The piece is semi-autobiographical. It's about an abusive relationship and how the woman came to cope with the abuse by cutting herself. We visit Joyce and Glen and their families as teenagers and find out where their abusive pasts began. It's very intense and not for the faint of heart.

THE TIME FOR "FEATHER" HAS BEEN MOVED TO 10am 

** Member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc.

+Member of International Center for Women Playwrights

Venus Theatre is an award winning professional theatre company.  Our professional plays are judged by and eligible for DC's Helen Hayes Awards.

Outstanding Achievements Include:

The Helen Hayes American Express Award

2004 Curve Magazine Play of the Year Award

2005 Curve Magazine Play of the Year Award

2004 nomination for the American Theatre Critics Award

here's just a brief recollection of some wonderful collaborations... 

Carolyn Gage

"The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women"

Directed by Kerri Rambo to critical acclaim from the Washington Post

"Ugly Ducklings"

This went on to be further produced and turned into a documentary by Fawn Yacker.  Today Ugly Duckling kits are used by Northern schools to teach tolerance.  A nonprofit named Hardy Girls has been formed as a result of the project.

"Sappho In Love"

"The Gage and Mr. Comstock"

"The Spindle" 

"Rules of the Playground"

"The Goddess Tour"

Cynthia Cooper 

"How She Played the Game"

"Sor Juana"

 "Tru Luv"

L.J. Voss

"The Hen Gets a Flag"

"Tiny Madmen"

"A Little Rebellion Now"

"Wolf Wistle"

"Pyschodrama" 

Julianne Homokay

"Sisters Lunching by the Seaside"

"Cottonmouth"

Migdalia Cruz

"Cigarettes and Moby Dick" 

John Ford Noonan

"All She Cares About Is the Yankees" 

Aoise Stratford

"Oh, Baby!"

Mary F. Casey

"Women and Horses and a Shot Straight From the Bottle"

Linda Suzuki

"Just Sex (Jazz Hands)"

"All My Silence Is Yours "

Dave Carley

"The Edible Woman"

based on the novel by Margaret Atwood 

Kimberly Moore

"The Ballad of Step-Off Girl"