Tag Archives: Venus Theatre Play Shack

We are Samurai at Venus Theatre, Sept 4-28

We are Samurai at Venus Theatre, Sept 4-28

We are Samurai
by Daria Miyeko Marinelli

Location: Venus Theatre Play Shack.

September 4 – 28, 2014
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00pm; Saturdays and Sundays at 3:00pm.

Tickets: $20. Buy here.

Parental advisory: Adult themes.

Description: After Josephine returns home to find her cats brutally murdered for a crime she committed in a past life, she enlists her boyfriend to help her avenge her cats’ deaths. What follows is a suburban revenge tragedy about four twenty-somethings engaging in petty acts of violence in an effort to absolve a millennia-old offense. Rooted in both contemporary suburbia and the historical traditions of Japanese Theatre, We Are Samurai uses cats, iPhones, and simultaneous action to explore age-old questions of agency and entitlement. As the piece unfolds simultaneously across four difference playing spaces, it is up to the audience to choose what to witness.

Sign up for Butterfly Camp at Venus Theatre, July 14-18

Sign up for Butterfly Camp at Venus Theatre, July 14-18

Camp for Kids who want to spread their wings
Butterfly Camp
…because we’re always changing…

Monday, July 14, 2014 to Friday, July 18, 2014

Location: Venus Theatre Play Shack.
21 C Street
Laurel, MD 20707

This is a 5 day Camp for ages 6-12. Camp runs from 9-3 Mon July 14 – Thursday July 17, with a final lunchtime performance on Friday July 18. Campers will learn some general tools of acting, apply their growing knowledge of story structure, and engage their imaginations.

Cost: $400.

For more information: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/9931237

Light of Night at Venus Theatre, May 8-June 1

Light of Night at Venus Theatre Play Shack, May 8 – June 1

Light of Night
by Cecelia Copeland

Location: Venus Theatre Play Shack.

May 8 to June 1, 2014
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00pm; Saturdays and Sundays at 3:00pm.

Tickets: $20. Buy here.

Parental advisory: Adult themes.

Description: Light of Night is Stephanie’s poetic descent into the underworld of marriage. As her seductive best friend and charismatic husband fight over who she should be, Stephanie is pulled back and forth between freedom and loyalty. In the end she must decide which doors to leave open for light and which windows to bar against the cold. A modern poetic Latina retelling of the Persephone Myth.

Ding! or Bye Bye Dad at Venus Theatre, Mar 6-30

Ding or Bye Bye Dad at Venus Theatre, Mar 6-30

Ding! or Bye Bye Dad
by Jayme Kilburn

Location: Venus Theatre Play Shack.

March 6 to 30, 2014
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00pm; Saturdays and Sundays at 3:00pm.

Tickets: $20. Buy here.

Parental advisory: Adult themes.

Description: Two sisters, Hamiere and Boomer, creep silently towards their sleeping father, one armed with a bat the other with a frying pan. At the sound of a bell we are swept into a high-pressured speed-dating scenario. Hamiere is a ball of insecurities, a relationship dunce who finds it more convenient to love a dog than a human being. Boomer, her sister, serves as a fire starter and manic cheerleader, constantly pushing her sister to try and form a meaningful human bond all the while choosing only to date gay men because of her new-found distaste for sex. As the bell rings and the daters change seats, we are bystanders to Hamiere’s awkward emotional admissions: her pseudo-lesbian fantasies, her desire to give birth to puppies, and her thoughts on the afterlife. As the play unfolds the audience experiences vignettes of Hamiere and Boomer’s troubled past with men. Ding or Bye Bye Dad centers on the father / daughter relationship and what happens when that relationship is illformed. In the end, Hamiere and Boomer edge silently towards their father’s deathbed, kitchen utensils in hand, ready to kill their monster.

No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn, or Emily Dickinson’s Sister at the Venus Theatre Play Shack, Nov 7-Dec 1

No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn, or Emily Dickinson’s Sister at the Venus Theatre Play Shack, Nov 7-Dec 1

by Claudia Barnett

November 7 to December 1

Location: Venus Theatre Play Shack.

Thursday, November 7 at 8:00pm
Friday, November 8 at 8:00pm
Saturday, November 9 at 3:00pm and 8:00pm
Sunday, November 10 at 3:00pm
Thursday, November 14 at 8:00pm
Friday, November 15 at 8:00pm
Saturday, November 16 at 3:00pm and 8:00pm
Sunday, November 17 at 3:00pm
Thursday, November 21 at 8:00pm
Friday, November 22 at 8:00pm
Saturday, November 23 at 3:00pm and 8:00pm
Sunday, November 24 at 3:00pm
Saturday, November 30 at 3:00pm and 8:00pm
Sunday, December 1 at 3:00pm

Description: Kate Stoddard murdered Charles Goodrich in 1873–after he told her they weren’t really married and had her evicted from his Brooklyn brownstone in a blizzard. Kate’s struggles to maintain her sanity and her identity, both before and after she shot her one true love three times in the head, are the subject of this play, which moves backwards and forwards through time and invokes a poetry of madness.

A note on the title: Virginia Woolf imagined a sister for Shakespeare, an artist chastened for her gender and derided for her vision. Unable to act or write, she “killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads.” Claudia Barnett imagines a similarly metaphorical sister for Emily Dickinson. Kate Stoddard was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1847, about a hundred miles from the reclusive Amherst poet. Inspired by Woolf’s musings, Dickinson’s poetry, and Stoddard’s tragic life, No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn, or Emily Dickinson’s Sister asks: How might the same impulse lead one woman to poetry and another to murder?

Claudia Barnett teaches playwriting at Middle Tennessee State University. She has developed two previous scripts, Feather and Another Manhattan, with Venus Theatre. She wrote No. 731 Degraw-street, Brooklyn, or Emily Dickinson’s Sister as playwright-in-residence at Tennessee Repertory Theatre, and she wrote Witches Vanish as resident playwright at Stage Left Theatre. Her book I Love You Terribly: Six Plays is published by Carnegie Mellon (2012).

“When … one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs … I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor …”

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“She had cultivated a romantic disposition by a liberal perusal of story papers and novels, and it is more than likely that cheap literature is the prime cause of all her woes and misfortunes.”

The Goodrich Horror:
Being the full confession of Kate Stoddart, or Lizzie King
Thanks for letting the girl talk.

PARENTAL ADVISORY: Ages 16+ – 731 covers rich literary territory with an amazing physical element that has a kind of violence always brewing just under the surface.

Tickets: General Admission $20. Purchase tickets on-line.

Suggested meal before the show: Fajita, or anything that sizzles on a hot pan.
Tampico Tex-Mex Restaurant
42 Washington Blvd
Laurel, MD 20707
301.490.5300