Let’s Hear It!: A Reader’s Theatre Staging of New Plays
“Becoming Cherokee” by McCoy
Thursday, Sept. 23, 8 p.m.
The play features two brothers from California who inherit acreage in Oklahoma from an unknown relative. They are soon confronted with heretofore unknown Cherokee relatives who are stewards of the land. The brothers are faced with the decision of whether to keep the land, embrace their own Cherokee heritage and ancestry, or sell it for cash to stimulate their professional careers on the West Coast.
“Across the Atlantic” by Gretchen Suárez-Peña
Friday, Sept. 24, 8 p.m.
The story is based on an actual woman who is mentioned in Spanish journals from the conquest of the Americas. Madalena is an indigenous Tocobaga woman from Florida. She is taken captive and enslaved by the Spanish empire to then become an intermediary and translator for the Spanish crown. Lost in history, save only for her mention in a friar’s journal, her story travels from Florida through the Caribbean, across the Atlantic and back again. A tale of mystery, faith, life and death gives an account erased from the colonial history of the Americas.
“Emperor Tide” by Lori Snook, PhD, associate professor of English at Stetson
Saturday, Sept. 25, 8 p.m.
The one-act play is about the two characters, Carter and Tyson, who are heading to the beach to celebrate their anniversary. As the tide starts to come in, they look out at the ocean and spend an evening together. Yet, the tide keeps coming, and coming.
“Smoke-Cross’d Lovers––A Comedic Tragedy in Two Acts” by Stetson alumnus Mark aloysius Kenneally and his wife Nicole Kenneally
Presented after “Emperor Tide” on Saturday, Sept. 25, 8 p.m.
A respiratory therapist and adamant non-smoker crosses paths with a carefree chain-smoker with a cough-in-the-face-of-death mentality, and sparks immediately start to fly. Can their opposing viewpoints ever dampen enough to allow them to somehow meet in the middle? And if so, will they ever be able to find any redeeming qualities of each other’s way of life that they never found in their own?
“Beyond the Summer of Love” by Jim Moss
Sunday, Sept. 26, 3 p.m.
Andrea has arrived at her mother’s home to collect her rebellious daughter Olivia, who has decided to skip her senior year of high school and remain in Olympia, Washington. Cilla, an original flower child of the 1960s, is fine with her granddaughter shacking up with an older man named Gifford. When Andrea discovers the details, a battle of the generations ensues. Andrea attempts to blackmail Gifford, and Cilla reveals why she gave up Andrea to be raised by her own mother.
“No Exit” by Jean-Paul Sartre
November 18-21
Three damned souls, Garcin, Inez, and Estelle are brought to the same room in hell by a mysterious Valet. They had all expected medieval torture devices to punish them for eternity, but instead find a plain room where they discover that “hell is other people.”
“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992″
February 17-20
Acclaimed as “an American masterpiece” (Newsweek), TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES, 1992 is a stunning work of “documentary theatre” in which Anna Deavere Smith uses the verbatim words of people who experienced the Los Angeles riots to expose and explore the devastating human impact of that event. A work that goes directly to the heart of the issues of race and class, TWILIGHT ruthlessly probes the language and the lives of its subjects, offering stark insight into the complex and pressing social, economic and political issues that fueled the flames in the wake of the Rodney King verdict
A Doll’s House, Part 2 by: Lucas Hnath
April 7-10
When Nora Helmer left her husband at the conclusion of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1879 it was referred to as “The door slam heard ‘round the world.” For more than a century and a half of audiences have asked, “What happened to Nora and her family?” In 2017, playwright, Lucas Hnath, attempted to answer that question. Picking up 15 years after the original play concludes, this fast paced, funny and soul searing piece of theatre, examines the love, hate and resentments, we so often call “family”
