Germinating New Works, This Women-Driven Local Festival Covers a Lot of Ground
Centering female playwrights and directors, The Shattered Glass Project’s festival of new works includes timely topics, historical time-travel, and camp-horror fantasy. The festival’s four one-act plays perform through the weekend at 18th & Union.
A campy gothic-horror lesbian romantic comedy. A solo show of interweaving monologues on bodily autonomy, language, and race. A narrative that shifts through time to tell personal stories amidst large-scale tragedies.
What do they have in common? Very little, apart from the fact that they’re three productions at The Shattered Glass Project’s New Voices, New Narratives festival, on now at 18th and Union.
The festival is the culmination of TSGP’s 2023-2024 Incubator/Mentorship program, which pairs playwrights and directors, all of them female and non-binary artists, and provides them with mentorship, workshopping and networking opportunities, and a platform to show audiences the work that comes out of them.
The festival includes four one-hour plays, performing in different rotations each day, with three of the four showing on the Friday night I attended. The fourth work, On the Train, does not perform on Fridays. The play, written by Lisa Price and directed by Christie Zhao, is a timely exploration of bodily autonomy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
(View schedule of remaining performances here.)
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Created by writing team Mariah Lee Squires and S.W. Jones, Carmilla is an entertaining gothic romp based on the early vampire novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. It tells the story of a young, wealthy woman named Laura who longs for female friendship. She gets that and more when a carriage “accident” brings another young lady, the vampire Carmilla, into her home.
This adaptation follows the novel’s major plot points while adding a sense of irreverent, goofy humor, poking fun at the silly formality of outdated customs while lending its characters sympathy. Under Aidyn Stevens’ direction, the campiness is delightfully pronounced with exaggerated physical comedy and gentle mocking of the sensual temptress figure and other horror genre cliches.
The production cleverly morphs from its self-aware sense of humor to something more dark and sinister. The sequence in which our human protagonist has a nightmare is legitimately startling, thanks to its haunting choreography and carefully manipulated set pieces (scenic design by Bella Rivera). And the romance that grows between Laura (played by Jessica Marvin-Romero) and Carmilla (Mia McGlinn) is portrayed with both tenderness and desire, making it hard not to root for them even while fearing for Laura’s life.
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Poet Jourdan Imani Keith’s The Uterine Files — whose full title is The Uterine Files: Episode One, Voices Spitting Out the Rainbow, a reference to Ntozake Shange’s celebrated work — defies both writing and theatrical genres.
Part spoken-word poetry, part interweaving dramatic monologues, part immersive theatre, The Uterine Files features a single actor portraying over a half-dozen characters who take turns telling their stories: a professor of history delivering a lecture; a hairdresser giving a pep-talk to a client; an elderly woman confiding in a relative. Each is quite different in content and form, but certain ideas and motifs are threaded throughout: the ways that bodies can carry emotional traumas; the slippages of language; the weights Black women bear for not just themselves, but for others; the beauty and danger of falling in love in a politicized world. The language of each story is lush and poetic while maintaining every character’s unique voice.
Even with so many stories unfolding in just 60 minutes, director Rebecca O’Neil excels at pacing this show in a way that allows the audience to enjoy getting swept up in the language while keeping track of the different narrators. Actor Ziara Greathouse gives a powerhouse performance, imbuing the many roles with compassion and wisdom. It’s the kind of piece that reverberates long after the final spoken word.
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Moving through three different timelines, Out of Time depicts personal stories each set against the background of a national catastrophe. The play starts off in the future, opening with two characters at a support group for loved ones of those who died in a recent national disaster. Audiences then travel back in time over a century ago to witness a scene between two women stuck in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
In each scene, playwright Rachel Atkins skillfully fleshes out the lost humanity and futures of those who perished, or of the loved ones they left behind, bringing empathy and individuality to the victims of large-scale catastrophes. Director Divya Rajan finds ways to highlight the moments of both connection and disconnect between the various unlikely pairs brought together by tragedy. The lighting team of Montse Garza and Breanna Strobele make the most of the space with their designs, from dappled shadows to lights mimicking police cars.
With only three actors (Tessa “Cricket” James, Natalie Schmidt, and Azadeh Zanjani) portraying six characters, each shows range in depicting people who are, confusingly but accurately, both resistant to and hungry for genuine human connection.
For full cast and creative team information, view the festival program here.
The 2024 New Works Festival: New Voices, New Narratives runs through 5/19 at 18th & Union in the Central District. Tickets, including multi-show passes and pay-what-you-choose options offered for all, here. Accessibility notes: restroom is gender-neutral, single-stall; theatre can be made wheelchair accessible with a ramp, but the restroom is not — please contact venue ahead of time to ensure smooth access.
Run time: 60 minutes per show, with intermission between each for multi-show performances.
Anna Tatelman is a playwright, lyricist, and writer, whose recent stage works have performed at Detroit Repertory Theatre, As If Theatre Company, and Drunken Owl Theatre (upcoming), and whose writing about local theatre has appeared in the Federal Way Mirror. She can often be found drinking too much caffeine, befriending feral cats, and eating ice cream. Connect online here.