THE BARK & THE TREE Plays United Solo Tonight

The Bark & The Tree, Vivian Nesbitt's award winning, one-woman play about connection and transformation returns to United Solo Festival tonight, October 9, 2014. The play won best documentary play and best lighting design out of 120 entries at the 2013 United Solo Theatre Festival, as well as two sell out performances - earning her an invitation to return for the 2014 season.

The Bark & The Tree returns to United Solo after a performance in Headford, County Galway, Ireland in September, where the story began twenty-two years ago. In 1992, Nesbitt traveled to Ireland in search of information about her great-great grandmother, the celebrated Irish republican poet known as Eva of the Nation. More than a heritage seeker's documentary, Nesbitt bends time and space to understand the legacy of her ancestor. She portrays seven different characters that cause her to collide with her personal demons and her sense of place in the world. Themes of duality, perception and creative expression fill the play with moments of discovery and surrender, juxtaposed with laugh-out-loud insights into the comedy of human nature.

In his review of the play for the Irish Voice/Irish Central, Cahir O'Doherty states "Nesbitt shows us how a nation in crisis, and a culture facing into dissolution, can flounder but eventually gather itself up, take stock, express its journey in words to make sense of itself and the road ahead. Nesbitt's story is her ancestors' story, and it's Ireland's story too. In Ireland it is said that we all live in each other's shadow, and the truth is we all live in each other's stories too." (Read more at http:// www.irishcentral.com/news/irishvoice/vivian-nesbitts-play-traces-her-ancestors-life-in-the-bark-and-the- tree-233649511-237790121.html#ixzz2srHku3uG).

"It's an honor to be invited back to the United Solo Festival," said Nesbitt. "The Bark & The Tree is a project that is incredibly dear to my heart, and to bring it back after a show in Ireland is truly special."