Baltimore
Footlights Reading Series
Free Event
- Donations accepted to help cover costs to theatre.
SPOTLIGHTERS will not be hosting any Dramatists Guild Readings during our 57th Season.
Please look for notices from the Dramatists Guild regarding readings & locations.
Footlights Reading Series
Free Event
- Donations accepted to help cover costs to theatre.
SPOTLIGHTERS will not be hosting any Dramatists Guild Readings during our 57th Season.
Please look for notices from the Dramatists Guild regarding readings & locations.
COMPLETED READINGS
Queen of the Air and Nanticoke Acres by Mark Scharf
Thursday, November 16 @ 7:30 PM
On the last leg of her round-the-world flight, Amelia Earhart vanished from the skies on July 2nd, 1937, and was never heard from again. Or was she? A few hours later, radio transmissions purportedly from Amelia were heard all over the world. Listeners included an American teenage girl in St. Petersburg, Florida, listening to her family’s radio, tuned to “short wave” frequencies. Over the next two days, the teenager kept a notebook next to her radio and transcribed, everything she heard and when she heard it until the transmissions stopped, on July 4th. Queen of the Air: The last Transmissions of Amelia Earhart follows Amelia as she struggles to survive and the fragile connection between herself and a young girl thousands of miles away.
Nanticoke Acres explores family connections, expectations, and the things that last that are worth holding onto. Val has been content living alone in the rambling, old family house on a large riverside property where she raised her now adult children. But, now, part of the roof has given way, forcing her to finally face selling and moving into a retirement community, as urged by her younger son against the wishes of her oldest son, who still clings to the house and land as home. Although each son wants to help her, their solutions are intertwined with solving their own problems.
The Expedition by Robin Cuddy
Thursday, January 18 @ 7:30 PM
The Expedition is a play of social action and social morality. A New York City photographer doing a piece for the National Geographic seeks to find out how Byrd, the elderly son of Admiral Richard Byrd, the great explorer, apparently got lost and starved to death in Baltimore in 1988. To try to get an angle on the story, she covers the trial of three homeless men suing the City of Baltimore for closing a men's homeless shelter. Her ex-lover, a Southern lawyer/philosopher, defends the homeless men in the trial.
The Folks at Home by R. Eric Thomas
Thursday, March 1 @ 7:30 PM (Postponed)
Roger and Brandon, an interracial black couple living in South Philadelphia, are doing the best they can.
Their mortgage is late, Roger's been laid off for months, and there might be a ghost in the attic. It's a lot. When Brandon's mom and Roger's parents fall on even harder financial times and are forced to move in with the struggling couple,
the blended family must figure out how to share space and how to survive.
The Folks at Home is a sharp and heartfelt political comedy in the style of Norman Lear's classic sitcoms of the 70s and 80s.
The Biography of Saints by Sharon Goldner
Thursday, April 12 @ 7:30 PM
For the longest time it was just Marlene and her daughter Gracie, two fabulous females living life after a bitter divorce, making a new kind of home in a new city, each helping raise the other. They are the proof that mothers and daughters can actually like one another. When Marlene's body puts out the welcome mat for cancer, it becomes the guest that will not leave. Much to Gracie’s dismay, a bed-ridden Marlene accepts the offer of help from her ex husband’s current wife, who just so happens to be the bitch--correction: harlot; correction: she-devil; no, no, femme fatale; no, person--the person who is the woman who broke up the marriage in the first place.
Volcano Dancer by C. A. Hall
Thursday, May 31 @ 7:30 PM (Postponed)
A musical drama about earth changes ...
Unturning, by Gloria Makino
Saturday, June 9 @ 1:00pm
Epic heroine Eustacia Vye struggles to belong in a world that condemns her as a half-breed witch.
Yet even as polite society shuns her, her mysterious charm proves irresistible, and she is pulled into a love triangle
inflamed by racial bias, class prejudice, and family tensions.
A musical by and about a mixed race woman, Unturning was adapted by Gloria Makino
from Thomas Hardy's novel The Return of the Native & the music of John Thomas
