Regina Buccola Set for Strawdog Theatr's Play Rites Series Tonight, 4/30

Strawdog Theatre's second installment of "Play Rites!," a free series of interactive conversations, visual displays and events designed around the award-winning theatre company's productions is "Saucy and Ambitious Devils: The World of The Duchess of Malfi" hosted by Regina Buccola, tonight, April 30 at 7 p.m. in Hugen Hall at Strawdog Theatre, 3829 North Broadway Street.

Regina Buccola, an associate professor of English and core faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at Roosevelt University and a founding member of Democracy Burlesque, Chicago's only political sketch comedy show, is the special guest for this event. The discussion, which will also feature Strawdog Artistic Director (and director and co-adapter ofThe Duchess of Malfi) Brandon Bruce and Dramaturg Anna Brenner, will focus on the role of women in Jacobean drama, revenge tragedies, and much more.

The event, along with a lobby installation created by Dramaturg Anna Brenner, complements Strawdog's production, The Duchess of Malfi. The event is free to the public and runs about one hour. Refreshments will be served. For more details about "Play Rites!" go to www.strawdog.org.

Regina Buccola is an Associate Professor of English and core faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at Roosevelt University. Her recent books, Fairies, Fractious Women and the Old Faith (2006) and Marian Moments in Early Modern Drama (co-edited with Lisa Hopkins 2007), offer materialist feminist critiques of 16th and 17th-century plays, both Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean. She has published essays on similar themes in Sixteenth-Century Journal, Early Theatre Journal, and the essay collections Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England and Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. A chapbook of her poetry, Conjuring, appeared in the New Women's Voices series at Finishing Line Press in 2009, and she edited A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Critical Guide for Continuum Press in 2010. Suiting the Action to the Word: Chicago Shakespeare Theater at 25, which she co-edited with Peter Kanelos, is forthcoming in from Northern Illinois University Press. She is also a Founding Member of Democracy Burlesque, Chicago's Only Political Sketch Comedy Show.

Photo credit: Aaron Gang Photography.