Audience Play Pick for Aurora Fox
Title of Play: American Girls
Playwright: Hilary Bettis
Synopsis: American Girls is set in a small town in Iowa and is about two young teenagers who want nothing more than to be famous. They are church-going girls that respect their Pastor who teaches them how to acknowledge their sins, ask for forgiveness, and thereby become better people. However¸ the girls struggle with knowing what is “sin” when they are drawn to the media’s portrayal of young women as sexy, famous, and carefree. The play juxtaposes the powerful influence of their Pastor with the powerful influence of celebrity driven media. The lines between taking advantage of a situation and being taken advantage of are incredibly blurred.
Title of Play: Arickaree
Playwright: James Paul Downing
Synopsis: It’s 1904 in Denver, a bustling, booming city. A wealthy eccentric has died and left his fortune in disarray. While in Denver to straighten out her grandfather’s estate, Cecelia, a 21-year old socialite from Philadelphia, whose upper crust parents adopted her in Colorado at the age of four, becomes curious about her mysterious origins. By chance, Cecelia meets a brash and handsome westerner, Antonio, who tries to lure her to stay in Denver by citing the many women’s rights (including voting) she could enjoy as a woman in the West. Arickaree is a fast paced story of a woman’s struggle to balance loyalty to her family while establishing her own identity.
Title of Play: Lesser Seductions of History
Playwright: August Schulenburg
Synopsis: The Lesser Seductions of History follows ten characters through each year of the 1960’s. History becomes as intimate as a lover when the decade’s fracture points of race, sex and war break and remake the characters in this coming-of-age story. The Lesser Seductions of History asks the question “what does it mean to be part of something greater than yourself?”
Title of Play: Sans Merci
Playwright: Johnna Adams
Synopsis: Tracy and Kelly, young students at UCI, are determined to make a difference by helping the U’wa Indians in Colombia organize a resistance campaign to protest the large Petroleum Corporation’s plan to drill for oil on the tribe’s sacred sites. Three years later, a no longer idealistic Kelly is the crippled survivor of a brutal attack, and Tracy never returned from the ill-fated mission of mercy. One rainy day in Los Angeles, Tracy's mother, Elizabeth, shows up unexpectedly at Kelly's apartment. This is their first meeting. Slowly, the two women dance through their grief, while negotiating the truth of what brought the two young women together, why they undertook their dangerous humanitarian mission, and what happened on that final day.
Title of Play: Slip/Shot
Playwright: Jacqueline Goldfinger
Synopsis: Kitty and Clem fall in love and find an escape from their dysfunctional families in each other. But when a party devolves into a terrible shooting at the hands of Clem, they tear themselves apart trying to figure out what went wrong. A play about the malleability of truth, and how we re-imagine history to protect the ones we love.
Title of Play: Stealing Baby Jesus
Playwright: Terry Dodd
Synopsis: Denver, Dec 1999: It’s the eve of the new millennium and there is a serial thief on the loose intent upon stealing Baby Jesus from any outdoor holiday display that features a nativity scene. Is it just a publicity stunt or more?
