SheWRITES: About the Plays
2006 SheWRITES Festival Plays
Sig Gotta Do, by Megan Gogerty
Sig is a 15-year-old spitfire: mom’s dead, dad’s drunk, and beloved brother Matt is in
jail for knocking up his underage girlfriend. When Matt asks her to help him beat the rap,
Sig must confront the powers that be in this small town, starting with the corrupt
and grieving sheriff. How far Is she willing to go to help her brother? In this
contemporary (and wildly different) riff on Shakespeare’s Measure
for Measure story
set Ottumwa, Iowa, ethics clash with the law until nobody knows for sure which is
right and wrong. There’s sex and songs, and at the end the door is held open for
redemption. Will anyone walk through?
Tally Ho - or
The Unsentimental Education of Bessot Suarez,
by Stephanie Fleischmann
Edna, a Kenyan primary school teacher with a class of 204 students, runs
away to London on a flying carpet, with a stowaway student, Vee, age 7, in tow.
And so begins their odyssey through London, a city of dislocated souls and
intersecting trajectories. Along the way they cross paths with: a singing
bird feeder; a preternaturally humane passport control; a prophesying butcher;
Bessot, a South Florida redneck; and the ghost of Bessot’s father, among others.
An impressionistic universe made up of transitory moments, populated by a
disjunctive community of transient world citizens—people on the periphery
for whom the idea of place is slippery indeed, and the notion of home is nearly nonexistent.
Trojan Barbie, by Christine Evans
Trojan Barbie is a car-crash adaptation of Euripides’
Trojan Women,
where
past and present times violently collide. Lotte, a modern-day English tourist
who repairs dolls, is thrown by American soldiers into an ancient prison camp,
where she encounters Hecuba, Andromache, Polly X and that infamous troublemaker,
Helen. Poly X is taken by the soldiers for ritual sacrifice, but they stop off
at the Baghdad Zoo to drink beer and party with the tigers. When the camp is
torched and the Trojan women enslaved, Lotte is rescued by the British embassy.
Lotte’s life returns to normal, until a revenge-obsessed Hecuba claws her way up
through the centuries to Lotte’s doll shop, in search of her murdered children’s bodies.