Baltimore Playwrights Festival Presents Reading of MARATHON, 3/12

The Baltimore Playwrights Festival (www.baltplayfest.com) announces our seventh public reading "Marathon" of the 30th season on 12 March at the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, 817 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, MD 21202. Beginning at 11:30 a.m. plays to be read are: Veteran's Day, by Judith Glass Collins, followed by inconstancy, by Bob Barr, at 1:00 p.m., and Familiar Strangers, by Margy Kahn at 3:00 p.m. After each reading there will be a discussion of the script with the playwright, director and actors. The event is free, and the general public is encouraged to attend.

In Veterans' Day, by Judith Glass Collins, three combat veterans--2 men and one woman meet in a Washington, D. C. bar. The three characters flirt, fight, and reveal secrets, struggling toward a possible redemption only possible by facing the truth.

Judith grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. Sundays were often spent visiting her father's family in Baltimore. At the turn of the 20th century, the patriarch of this part of the family emigrated from Eastern Europe and opened a delicatessen in Patterson Park. Ninety years later, Judith "emigrated" from the West Coast back to the East Coast, living in Fells Point, within walking distance of the site of the family deli. She was completing an internship at the Perry Point Veterans Medical Center, material from that experience finding its way into the writing of Veterans' Day. Judith traversed the country once again, and is now living near Port Townsend, Washington. Her plays have received staged readings and productions in Port Townsend, Seattle, and Darien, Connecticut.

Inspired by Bob's appearance as Bentley in the 2007 Olney Theatre production of Somerset Maugham's perennial The Constant Wife, Inconstancy, by Bob Barr, is a high- comedy sequel to that play, at the end of which, newly financially independent Constance leaves her unfaithful husband, John, to go off on a six week holiday with Bernard, an old flame. John asks her to come back. When she does, Inconstancy assumes, it is 1931, a year and a half later, after the Wall St Crash has turned the world upside down. John has been fiscally wiped out while Constance is more independent than ever, as a result of becoming Bernard's business partner. They have, however, stopped being lovers. Both men still want her, but it is not until John's former mistress turns up to stake a claim on John that Constance is forced to take decisive action. With the help of a "judges' bench" involving her Mother, her Sister and her friend, she comes to a surprising conclusion. Robert (Bob) M. Barr is a Phi Beta Kappa grad of the University of North Carolina and holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. Due to the arrival of a much-loved first child shortly after graduation, he worked, outside the theatre, in marketing in New York, Baltimore and Washington for many years. On retirement to NC, he returned to regional theatre as an actor at such venues as Burning Coal, the Olney, Studio Theatre, Washington Stage Guild, the Folger and the Shakespeare Theatre. He is a proud member of Actors Equity, the Playwrights Center and the Assn. for Jewish Theatre. He returned to playwriting, his first love, in 2000 and has since written four full-length and twelve 10 minute plays. One full-length, Matchmakers, has just been published in the UK by Lazy Bee Scripts. Three of his ten minute plays have been done recently in Alabama, North Carolina and Singapore.

Familiar Strangers, by Margy Kahn, follows the story of Massoumeh, who thought she made the right decision to leave her overbearing husband and seek her own life as an independent woman in Los Angeles. But now it is 1991 and Donya, her 15 year old daughter, is getting picked up for shoplifting. Sally, Massoumeh's longtime friend, was running a sociological study on arranged marriage when she met Ali and then Massoumeh in the late 1970s. Now she is shocked to hear Massoumeh wonder aloud if she would have been better off raising her daughter in post- revolutionary Iran. Into this welter of doubts and clash of values walks Massoumeh's former husband, a man partly broken by his experiences in Iranian prison. When Donya and her bad-ass friend Carissa dream up new ways to risk their lives, Massoumeh must come to terms with the choices she has made.

Margy Kahn is delighted to be back in Baltimore. Her interest in theater was originally sparked by volunteering at Centerstage while she was a student at Dulaney High School in Timonium. Five of her short plays, have been chosen for production as part of Slices, the annual short play festival at the Pear Avenue Theatre in Mountain View, CA. She is the author of Children of the Jinn: In Search of the Kurds and Their Country as well as short stories about encounters between Americans and Middle Easterners published in Kalliope, Ararat, Iowa Woman, Crab Orchard Review, and West, the former magazine section of the San Jose Mercury News. She has studied playwriting with Amy Freed and acting with Kay Kostopoulos at Stanford University. Currently she is a member of the Pear Avenue Theatre Playwrights' Guild and Theatre Bay Area

The Baltimore Playwrights Festival has presented 266 scripts by 158 playwrights, produced by 25 different companies, over the past 29 Years. Further information can be found at www.baltplayfest.com.

 

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