red light/green light series

This annual event is a chance for our audiences to have a direct impact on our season for the coming year. We bring one of our seldom-or never seen original plays to you in the form of a staged reading, and through your feedback, we decide if we’ll take it to the next step: full production.

“Molly Rice is an intriguing writer. Her amorphous but palpable descriptions speak of an idea that is powerfully, impossibly visceral. [The play] throws the audience into a hallucination with its stunt-fueled stage presence.” – Jason Clearfield, Pittsburgh in the Round

Watch, A Haunting

Vi, a lonely girl in a creaky old house, is burdened by a predatory shrink, a crumbling mother, bad dreams and a haunting loss– until her new ghostlike friend Renata promises to either guide or force her to face down the frightening Thing in the Basement.

WATCH is a theatrical ghost story about the range of human perception, from the “real” to the supernatural to pathology-fueled hallucination, and who gets to decide what’s acceptable within the spectrum. It’s about the wisdom that lives in the visions of atypical minds and in supernatural experience, wisdom that exists outside scientific authority. It’s also about a young girl who, having lost her father, employs her unique gifts of perception to attempt to heal herself.

WATCH was nominated for the Kesselring Fellowship and has been developed at the Women’s Project (NYC), Trinity Rep (Providence, RI), and Kitchen Dog Theater (Dallas TX). It had a workshop production at the Strand Theater in Baltimore, but has never been fully produced.

Written by Molly Rice
Directed by Rusty Thelin
Cast: Julianne Avolio*, Moira Quigley, Kimberly Parker Green*, Brendan Griffin*, Hazel Leroy, and Don DiGiulio, with video/ media by Alex Reed. Interns: Jillian Bradshaw and Anna Jamieson Beck.

Don’t Stop, A Play with Dance Breaks

“And she’s like/ Up against me/ And like/ Man/ Something I didnt even know down in there/ And it’s not/ Not to/ Like/ Be with her/ But like/ Be her/ Be her/
I didn’t know I want that”

Welcome to the world of hurt and heaven that is human adolescence. DON’T STOP is a full-contact, sharp-edged play about how we go slamming around changing each other, with or without permission. The play won the Brown University Weston Award for Graduate Playwriting. It was nominated for the Cherry Lane Mentor Fellowship, was a finalist for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference and the Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival, and has been developed by Voice and Vision (Bard College), The Women’s Project in NYC and the Missoula Colony, but has never been fully produced.

Written by Molly Rice
Directed by Rusty Thelin
Production Stage Manager: Rachel D’Amboise
Choreographed by Anthony Alterio with Megan Forster
Dancers: Mary Houle, Megan Forster, Lawrence Karl