2012-2013 Season
Our 2012-2013 Beth Marshall Presents Season
We are pleased to announce our 2012-2013 theatrical season and look forward to continuing to bring both quality original and published works to our audiences within Central Florida as well as our touring regions. We are honored to once again be partnered with The Garden Theatre and Orlando Shakespeare Theatre serving as our venue hosts. Tickets for our season will go onsale Sept.1st 2012.
PLAY-IN-A-DAY
HISTORY:
Play-In-A-Day has been present within our Orlando theatre community for numerous years. Beth Marshall has been involved as an artist for 15 years and has served as Producing Artistic Director for the event for the past 7 years as a benefit for Orlando Shakespeare Theatre’s annual PLAYFEST. Moving forward, Orlando Shakes/PLAYFEST has graciously gifted Beth Marshall Presents with the annual event to fully produce under her own production company. In our next newsletter, we will have a big announcement of our new partner and venue location for this beloved annual event.
About PIAD:
A team of roughly 40 theatre artists (actors, directors, writers and production team) work together to write, rehearse, tech and perform 5 original 10 minute short plays revolving around the same theme within a 24 hour time frame.
Additionally, this year, we will be adding an original 30 minute staged reading, as well as an original dance component, silent auction, raffles, appetizers and drinks to make for a full 2.5hrs of artistic fun.
Play- In- A-Day will take place in fall of 2012 and kick off our BMP season.
AMERICAN ALPHABET
American Alphabet
Written & Performed by Lisa Cordes
When: January 17-20, 2013
Where: Lowndes Shakespeare Center
Mandell Theatre (812 E. Rollins St, Orlando FL)
ORLANDO PREMEIRE!
About the show:
American Alphabet is a powerful exploration of one woman’s family tree, from its racist “white cracker” roots to the green shoots of hope found among its 21st century branches. Beginning with the Civil War and her slave-owning great-great-grandfather through the election of Barack Obama, Lisa Cordes weaves personal narrative with the larger history of race and sex in America, traversing this rancorous terrain with acerbic humor, unflinching honesty, and a really big chalkboard. The epic story that unfolds in this theatrical classroom is one of heartbreaking beauty and deep forgiveness.
About the Writer/Performer:
Lisa Cordes is a freelance theater artist, writer, and recovering arts executive. Cordes has collaborated over the years with a number of visual artists and composers, creating a body of work that pokes at the American psyche and its discordant history with equal parts salt and salve.
In 2010, she was a recipient of a Charlotte Street Rocket Grant and an ArtsKC Inspiration grant for the development and performances of her play, Prop 8 On Trial, based on original trial transcripts from the first ever same-sex marriage case to be argued in a federal court. In 2012, Prop 8 On Trial was produced by Beth Marshall Presents in Orlando. As a resident artist at the Fishtank Performance Studio, she has collaborated on a number of performance projects including the “We Read It So You Don’t Have To” which debuted with a public reading of Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue. American Alphabet, a sobering yet acerbic solo exploration of her family tree and its inextricable ties to the history of race in America debuted at the 2010 Kansas City Fringe Festival.
Her interest in community-based art-making led her to a teaching stint at the Kansas City Art Institute and playwright residencies for high schools, a public housing projects, and a social service agencies, exploring issues such as homelessness, gun violence, and addiction. As a professional playwright, she has written several plays commissioned by The Coterie Theater, including scripts for their award-winning Dramatic AIDS Education Project that reaches some 18,000 young people annually.
Cordes is also the founder of two performance companies, Eyes Wide Open and Big Fragile Stage and her interest in a “theater of immediacy” led her to create “The Bus Event”, a series of performances staged at city bus stops involving over 60 artists and musicians. As a spoken word artist, Cordes has opened for musicians John Cale and Jello Biafra, and journalist Molly Ivins.
Cordes has served on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Missouri Arts Council and the Charlotte Street Foundation, and has consulted and written for the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
BILOXI BLUES
Biloxi Blues
By Neil Simon
Directed by Rob Anderson
When: Febrauary 8-24, 2013
Where: Garden Theatre (160 W. Plant St, Winter Garden)
About the play:
Winner, Tony Award for Best Play, 1985
The second in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Neil Simon’s trilogy which began with Brighton Beach Memoirs and concluded with Broadway Bound.
When we last met Eugene Jerome, he was coping with adolescence in 1930′s Brooklyn. Here, he is a young army recruit during WW II, going through basic training and learning about Life and Love with a capital ‘L’ along with some harsher lessons, while stationed at boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1943.
“A fine comedy, and another step in the process of making Simon neither so simple, nor so simplistic.”-New York Post
“Joyous and unexpectedly rewarding.”-The New York Times
“A play that rings with a newer, deeper, sweeter truth.”-New York Magazine
CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD
Children Of A Lesser God
By Mark Medoff
Directed by Beth Marshall
When: March 15-31, 2013
Where: Garden Theatre (160 W. Plant St, Winter Garden)
About the play:
Winner of the Tony Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Drama Desk Award “After three years in the Peace Corps, James, a young speech therapist, joins the faculty of a school for the deaf, where he is to teach lip-reading. He meets Sarah, a school dropout, totally deaf from birth, and estranged both from the world of hearing and from those who would compromise to enter that world. Fluent in sign language, James tries, with little success, to help Sarah, but gradually the two fall in love and marry. At first their relationship is a happy and glowing one, as the gulf of silence between them seems to be bridged by their desire to understand each other’s needs and feelings, but discord soon develops as Sarah becomes militant for the rights of the deaf and rejects any hint that she is being patronized and pitied. In the end the chasm between the worlds of sound and silence seems almost too great to cross…but love and compassion hold the hope of reconciliation, and a deeper, fuller understanding of differences that, in the final essence, can unite as well as divide.
“CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD is an extraordinary play-illuminating, consistently interesting and moving.” -Variety.
TOURING SEASON
In addition to our fully staged theatrical productions, we will continue producing Paul Strickland’s original shows globally and will be spending the entire season working on 2 new original works for local and touring productions in future seasons. As always, we remain open to producing commissioned shows within our “OFF THE WALLS SERIES”.
