Susan Cinoman Set to Debut GUENEVERE at Guilford Performing Arts Festival

Playwright, screenwriter and short story author Susan Cinoman will present the first public reading of her play "Guenevere" during the Guilford Performing Arts Festival on Saturday, September 28, in downtown Guilford, Connecticut. The festival is proud to have supported Cinoman's development of "Guenevere" with its first-ever Guilford Performing Arts Festival Artists' Award in Drama.

Since being named recipient of the award in 2018, Cinoman has extensively workshopped, revised and refined "Guenevere," and she says she's hoping to present something "exciting, hilarious and transcendent for the audience." The fully costumed reading, featuring seven actors, will take place at 7:30 p.m. at the Christ Episcopal Church on the Guilford Green. Admission is free. There will be an opportunity to give feedback to the playwright after the 90-minute reading.

The reading is a highlight among the festival's more than 70 free performances and workshops that will take place throughout Guilford from September 26-29. Some festival artists will teach in the public schools, and the dance company Pilobolus will work with residents of a senior living center and with the cast and staff of a theater company whose members ambulate with crutches or wheelchairs.

"Guenevere" uses a retelling of the King Arthur myth to illuminate the power struggle between women and men in friendship, love and work. A twist occurs at the beginning, setting the play spinning, and the audience is never let off the hook in an entertaining, fresh, shocking and unexpected journey. The play features a battle of wills, intrigue, romance, murder, and a timely feminist perspective on the dynamics between men and women, on politics and on destiny.

Directed by Hannah Simms, the reading will feature actors David Girard, Sean Hannon, Barbara Hentschel, Yvonne Perry, Patrick Ramsay Jr., Emilie Roberts and Robert Weiner.

The Guilford Performing Arts Festival created the Artists' Awards with the support of the Guilford Foundation in 2018 to encourage the development of new work by Connecticut performing artists and to provide a vehicle for the debut of original material at the festival. Each award was accompanied by a grant of $2,500. Jazz pianist and composer Noah Baerman was the recipient in Music.

Cinoman is an internationally produced and published writer of short stories and of scripts for television and the stage. Two of her full-length plays-"Gin and Bitters" and "Cinoman and Rebeck"-have been produced Off Broadway, and Cinoman is a frequent contributor to the ABC show "The Goldbergs." The character Miss Cinoman, a drama teacher, is based on Cinoman herself. Several of Cinoman's plays are available as films, including "All Me, All the Time," and "Love and Class in Connecticut," which received The Best Connecticut Filmmaker Award at the Connecticut Film Festival in 2009.