The Strand Theater Announces First Performance Of The 2018-19 Season!

The Strand Theater Company presents You'd Be So Much Prettier If You..., the product of an ongoing workshop dedicated to developing a community of women. Using the template of consciousness-raising groups that sprung out of the Women's Movement, the women's performance workshop creates a safe space for women-identified participants to talk about their personal lives and socially relevant issues. The final performance, collaboratively crafted from these conversations, reflects the breadth of the participants' experiences and stories.

You'd Be So Much Prettier If You... is the Strand Theater Company's first offering of the season, kicking off a year of performances that unapologetically deal with issues surrounding oppression, black lives, corruption, gentrification, and misogyny.

You'd Be So Much Prettier If You... decentralizes the hierarchal power relationships usually found in traditional theater productions. Each workshop participant has served as the director of their own show and each story has been created with the input of the entire ensemble. You'd Be So Much Prettier If You... is part of an ongoing series of workshops and performances dedicated to empowering women to tell their own stories.

"The Women's Performance Workshop sprung out of a performance that myself and a few Cornell undergraduates and graduates put up two years ago as part of an experimental theater lab," says You'd Be So Much Prettier If You... facilitator Jayme Kilburn. "I wanted to create a piece of theater that allowed women to tell their own stories. I am fascinated with archival feminist performance groups that give the performer the power to dictate how they will be represented onstage. During the course of creating this show, the women in the group have turned an empty room into a sacred space where we can talk about anything."

The performance will feature Baltimore community members Ann Tabor, Lisa Banks, Kerry Brady, Tara Cariaso, Kelly Cardall, Sarah Cosgrove, Christen Cromwell, Emily Hall, Amber Hendricks, Kat Kaplan, Kat Martineau, Mkawasi Mcharo Hall, Lucie Poirier, Barbara Wilgus, Christine Valeriann, Robin Yasinow

"The Women's Performance Workshop was a new way for me to engage with other women-identified people through theater. I've worked on plays with all women casts and have experienced hashing through some of the issues that women uniquely experience in the world - but never have I been in an environment where all participants wanted to reveal their own experiences with such joy and freedom. It's a ride I don't want to get off." - Tara Cariaso

The Strand Theater Company champions challenging and provocative theater that especially celebrates women's diverse voices and perspectives while bringing together the creative talents of both women and men as artists, technicians, and administrators. We invite patrons to experience some of the region's best contemporary and reinterpreted works for the stage in our intimate midtown theater in Baltimore, Maryland.