Reading Resistance: May Marathon

Join us for a full day of new one-act play readings.

Explore themes ranging from necessary secrets, to Homeric rescues, to the troubles of Dirt, to severe weather in the conscience of the Midwest. Whimsy, dark edges, and busted stereotypes are on display back to back with silly solutions and stubborn ghosts.

Refreshments and puppets will be served!

WASH: Upstate New York, 1965. In a narrow kitchen filled with rain, laundry, and unspoken labor, two sisters face the cost of survival in a world that offers women no safe choices. When Mary comes to Martha for help, responsibility replaces mercy, and work replaces consolation. Wash is a quiet reckoning with reproductive danger, moral inheritance, and the unseen endurance required to keep living after tragedy. It is a play about whose hands carry the weight, and who is left to scrub the aftermath.

HIDDEN HALLOWS: In a low-ceilinged basement beneath a sleeping model train set, three women in their seventies collide with the secret that has held their lives together for fifty years. When Deborah Lee insists on confession, Sharon responds with containment, and Tabby clings to civility as the room turns into a moral trap. The dialogue moves fast because silence would mean choosing sides. A dark, tightly-wound reckoning about guilt, control and the stories we build to survive what we did.

It's 1986 and hotter'n Hades on a hot plate when Tammy Gustafson arrives home with groceries and a lasagna dinner for her husband and teenage daughter. It isn't long before she discovers a pile of overdue bills, her nice throw blankets smellin' like the hogs out back, and an unwanted house guest. Before the sun sets, the Gustafsons unwittingly play host to both literal and metaphorical storms that threaten their family, home, livelihood and the soul of the United States of America.

HOMECOMING: A billionaire wants to buy a prize-winning newspaper. The publisher is resisting. Then a mysterious stranger walks in ...

99 BOTTLES OF BEER: A man is spewing hatred on the subway. Passengers are helpless to stop him — until one rider finds a way for them to band together.

En Mer Avec Louise Bourgeois by Michelle Beshaw is a tabletop, found object puppet piece based on the life and work of the artist Louise Bourgeois. Born in Paris in 1911 to complicated parents, this excerpt explores her early life, and feelings about the people, places and events that would inspire and animate her art well into her 90s. “My childhood” she would say, “Has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, it has never lost its drama.”

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Host or Publisher Old Stone House & Washington Park