Photo Flash: First Look at Refuge Theatre Project's LYSISTRATA JONES

LYSISTRATA JONES - a musical comedy by five-time Tony Award® nominee Douglas Carter Beane, with songs by Lewis Flinn - takes the premise of the Greek comedy LYSISTRATA, in which the women of Athens refuse to have sex with their husbands and lovers until the long-lasting Peloponnesian War is finally ended - and updates it to the present day at an American college. In Beane and Flinn's musical, a cheerleader named Lysistrata Jones convinces the girls at the fictional Athens University to withhold sexual favors until the school's basketball team ends its 30-year losing streak.

Check out a first look at the show below!

LYSISTRATA JONES was first produced by the Dallas Theater Center in Texas in 2010, and in early 2011 transferred to New York City, where it played off-Broadway in The Gym at Judson - an actual gymnasium in a church that is used for theatrical performances. Reviewing that production, THE NEW YORK TIMES's chief theater critic Ben Brantley called it "effervescent, tasty and surprisingly filling." The production transferred to Broadway in December 2011 and won Beane a Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical.

For LYSISTRATA JONES, Refuge continues its practice of staging in site-specific venues by mounting the musical in a church gymnasium, as did the original off-Broadway production. The Refuge production is performed in the Unity Lutheran Church gym, at 1212 W. Balmoral (at Broadway) in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood.

Performances are Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm (with a 4 pmmatinee on Saturday, November 18) and Sundays at 6 pm, through November 19th. Ticket prices for all seats are $25.00 plus applicable fees and may be ordered online at www.refugetheatre.com.

Photo credit: Zeke Dolezalek

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