Profiles Theatre to Host One-Night Event with Playwright Kate Walbert, 3/17

Profiles Theatre, currently celebrating its 26th Season, will host a special one-night event featuring playwright Kate Walbert for an audience talk-back and book signing on Tuesday, March 17, 2015 at Profiles' Alley Stage, 4147 N. Broadway. Walbert will appear at the theatre prior to the preview performance of her world premiere play Genius, followed by a post-show audience talkback and discussion.

Kate Walbert is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel A Short History of Women, named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times Book Review. Critics praised the story as an intelligent, emotional, and illuminating family account and feminist study. New York native Kate Walbert will arrive at Profiles on Tuesday, March 17 at 7pm to sign copies of her widely respected work and attend the 8:00pm performance of Profiles' world premeire of her new play, Genius. Immediately following the performance, Walbert will engage in a post-show audience discussion, moderated by Profiles Artistic Directors Darrell W. Cox and Joe Jahraus.

Profiles officially opens the world premiere of Genius, directed by Darrell W. Cox, at the Alley Stage on Thursday, March 19 at 8pm. Genius examines the secrets and alliances of two creative couples from different generations who find their lives changed forever after an uneasy dinner party. Joel, a once highly regarded painter turned museum director caught in the midst of a very public indiscretion and his wife Sara, a formally famous journalist, venture to Brooklyn for dinner with their new friends Peter and Charlotte, a young filmmaking couple with rising careers and a baby on the way. After an evening riddled with illuminating discoveries, deceptions and perhaps too much wine, each couple deconstructs the evening's events as they grapple with their own uncertain futures. Using a constantly shifting timeline, playwright Kate Walbert turns her kaleidoscopic lens on two marriages battered by urgent ambitions.

A Short History of Women, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, is a profoundly moving portrait of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters. It chronicles five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first. Walbert's newest novel, The Sunken Cathedral, will be released in the summer of 2015. Her other works include Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2004, The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the 2002 Connecticut Book Award in Fiction, and Where She Went, a collection of linked stories and a New York Times notable book. Her plays include an adapted version of A Short History of Women with readings at the Powerhouse Theater and the Roundabout Theater, Elsewhere, featured in readings at Playwrights Horizons and Ars Nova in New York as well as Year of the Woman, produced at the Yale Cabaret and the Lantern Theater in Philadelphia.

Tickets for the preview performance of Genius on Tuesday, March 17 are $20 each. Tickets are available by phone, (773) 549-1815, or online, www.profilestheatre.org.