August 18

Readings tonight from Sandy Hoskings' continuing play about young sisters growing up, interspersed with a surreal Moon, as well as more from Geralyn Horton's work on Susanna Centlivre, and Margaret McSeveny's play about an intergenerational family of women. Exciting to see the work in progress, and even more exciting for our volunteer readers, as they see how the playwrights are exploring and developing--even if they aren't quite sure themselves where the characters are taking them, which sparked a lively discussion about process and the extent to which some writers spend a great deal of time developing structure before writing, while others start in writing and then worry about structure later.

and photos from Carolyn Gage's workshop in the afternoon; she performed her "Calamity Jane" monologue as a way of getting into the ways she develops work based on recovering female subjects. She also talked about her play on Joan of Arc and--as longtime readers of the ICWP listserve will remember--the nightmare of discovering how a highly popular Brazilian production entirely subverted the play she wrote.

reading Calamity Jane
Jane snarls at viewers

and takes a swig