Her-Rah 2007

The International Centre for Women Playwrights (ICWP) and Around the Coyote (ATC) prepare for their Chicago HER-RAH 2007: A Festival of The World’s Best Women Playwrights And Their New Plays, on June 21-24, 2007 at Around the Coyote Gallery Arts Complex, 1935-1/2 W. North Ave.  

Chicago HER-RAH 2007 will present staged readings of new, production-ready plays by women from all over the world.  Rather than serving as a developmental workshop, the purpose of this event is to present high-profile staged readings of production-ready, women-authored scripts for the express purpose of providing promotional presentation that will lead these scripts into full production by professional theatres. ICWP received more than 150 play submissions from women playwrights all over the world for consideration in this event; the resulting program is a dynamic mix of 17 plays in a wide variety of playwriting genres, styles, and subject matter from playwrights all over the U.S. and world.  The included playwrights represent all regions of the United States, as well as South Africa, Mongolia, and Romania.  All of the featured plays are either Chicago or U.S. premieres.  Panel discussions on the craft of playwriting and networking parties with members of the Chicago theatre scene are also included in the four-day event.  HER-RAH! features 2007’s largest and most diverse one-weekend-only assembly of plays, playwrights, actors, and directors in Chicagoland’s entire theater season, with plays of interest to women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Transsexual communities, Senior Citizens, and more. The readings are directed by Chicago’s hottest up-and-coming young directors. Many of Chicago’s top off-Loop actors are also featured in the readings, including Jennifer Shin and Mia Park from Collaboraction’s current hit play, The Intelligent Design Of Jenny Chow.

The Chicago HER-RAH! Plays are:

SWEET GINGER, HOT AND BLUE
by P.H. Lin (New York, NY)
Ginger Chan wants to be an artist.  Her immigrant father insists she become a doctor.  Can the family survive, or will the combustible relationship between daughter and father destroy it?  Complicating things are a 95-year-old Jewish woman, a female Buddha, and the apparition-spirits of Ginger's mother and brother.

EMPTY FRIDGE, CARROTS, AND TOMATOES
by Naranjargal Khashkhuu (Ulaanbaatar, MONGOLIA)
The meager contents of a refrigerator become the catalyst for a family conflict and a heated discussion on the true nature of love and marriage in Mongolian society.

EVERYBODY ELSE (IS FUCKING PERFECT)
by Karen Jeynes (Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA)
Life is almost perfect in the suburban home of newlyweds Gavin and Cathy---a stable happy home and a good husband who is all she ever dreamed of.  Enter Cathy's sister Traci, fresh from yet another disastrous relationship in London.  Sparks fly in this wacky middle-class South African comedy---especially when Traci begins an affair with toyboy Jared.

EVEN THE DIRT BLEEDS DOWN HERE
by Carolyn Nur Wistrand (Flint, MI)
This play is a folkloric drama of the Deep South that embraces the relationship between magic and everyday life, the hierarchy of skin tone, and the unity of themes in African-American life over the 20th century.  The characters appear in 1904 and 1974 linked by fate, blood, and conjure.

HEADS
by EM Lewis (Santa Monica, CA)
A British Embassy worker, an American engineer, a network journalist and a freelance photographer are held captive in Iraq.  As death draws close, each hostage must decide what he'll do to survive.

ANOTHER PIECE OF CAKE
by Madelyn Sergel (Gurnee, IL)
Four old women telling the truth.

BOSWELL'S DREAMS
by Marie Kohler (Milwaukee, WI)
A comic-drama about the power of friendship, authenticity, and the written word, this play is grounded in the relationship between the 18th-century writers James Boswell and Samuel Johnson---but also leaps forward in time to the discovery of Boswell's personal journals by a female American graduate student in the 1950s.

PUSH
by Kristen Lazarian (Sherman Oaks, CA)
PUSH is the story of Brooke Gatwick, a vibrant Los Angeles art dealer with everything going for her.  She has a loving husband, a solid group of friends, and a thriving career with money to burn.  She also has deep insecurities about love and committment---and she's not the only one.  Brooke's husband, Owen, is also in doubt of his wife's fidelity.  But some tests are meant for failure, as Brooke and Owen soon discover.  When love becomes a game for this couple, it's a "push" that leaves everyone devastated and the fate of one marriage hanging in the balance.

BIRTH, by Karen Brody (Accord, NY)
This documentary play, based on interviews the playwright conducted with 118 women, is about modern childbirth in
America.

INCOMING
by Kathy Anderson (Audubon, NJ)
A lesbian couple is having a baby in an unusual way, involving an inverse gravity board, a game of Red Rover, and an ex-lover trapped in a hospital bed.

THE NUCLEAR SECRET
by Lucia Verona (BUCHAREST, ROMANIA)
This play presents the "huis clos", the confidential moment of the face-to-face discussion between the acting President of a country and the new President-elect.  The acting President has to tell his successor the most important state secrets.

B4
by Kathy Hsieh (Seattle, WA)
Three couples.  Three time periods.  One NYC apartment. Japanese-American couple Grace and Jimmy are re-starting their lives after being interned in WWII.  Walter Weissman and his wife Rachel struggle to break the blacklist in the 1950s.  Christina desperately searches for her husband after he leaves for the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

MANHATTAN CASANOVA
by Jenny Lyn Bader (New York, NY)
Dr. Charlotte Kaplan is a skeptical psychiatrist, attuned to trends, noticing that all of her patients and friends are falling in love even more quickly than usual.  Could one man be responsible?  A comedy about compulsive seduction.

GRIEVING FOR GENEVIEVE
by Kathleen Warnock (Astoria, NY)
The Peck sisters and their mother gather in Baltimore for Delilah's wedding.  A stroke of bad luck changes their plans, and the sisters have to take charge of the mother who's always tried to run their lives.

THEIR WINGS WERE BLUE
by Carmen Betancourt (Queens Village, NY).
Three characters escape from the Picasso painting The Tragedy.  The museum curator who watches over the painting falls in love with one of them and gives chase.

DARLIN'
by Charlotte Samples (Torrance, CA).
The anticipated arrival of a government photographer to an "Okie" migrant worker camp in the midst of the Great Depression brings forth a little girl's dream of having her picture taken in her deceased mother's one good, store-bought dress.

WHY’D YA  MAKE ME WEAR THAT, JOE?
by Vanda (New York, NY)
Two women fall in love with each other while their men are off fighting in the South Pacific in World War II. 

ICWP and Around the Coyote offer an All-Festival Pass, which gains admission to all staged readings, panel discussions, and networking parties for $15. A-la-carte admission to individual readings/panels is $5. Admission is first-come, first-served basis; reservations will not be accepted.  To find out more information visit www.internationalwomenplaywrights.org.