Hudson Theatre Works Presents BUNNIES By Joanne Hoersch

Hudson Theatre Works will open on October 7th with the premiere of Bunnies by New Jersey Playwright, Joanne Hoersch. Bunnies tells the story of five Playboy Bunnies, who in 1973, at the New York Playboy Club, find themselves uplifted by the rise of feminism, haunted by the GoodBar murder and conflicted about their jobs as sex symbols, while they bond in humor and compassion over the course of one evening. 1973 was a seminal year in that it also planted the seeds for the #MeToo movement, that would come to fruition in 2017.

Bunnies is based on Joanne Hoersch's own life experience working as a Playboy Bunny in the 1970s. It received a staged reading at HudsonTheatre Works' annual PlayWorks festival in 2016, and in March of 2019 it was selected for a staged reading at NJTC, under the auspices of the NJ Theatre Alliance and the NJ Women Playwrights Project to celebrate Women's Month. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Joanne Hoersch is the recipient of two grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. The first, in 1998 was for fiction, the second in 2012 was for her first play, "Jackson Is Gone," which was also selected for a round table reading at The Lark Theatre in NY and was produced in 2013 by Hudson Theatre Works. She received her BA in drama from Emerson College and studied fiction at Columbia University where she won a Woolrich fellowship in fiction as well as the university -wide short story contest. She was a national semi-finalist in the Heekin Foundation's fiction contest. She is also the author of the romance novel "The Dream Room," under the pseudonym, Charlotte Glass, available on Kindle.

Bunnies stars Mandy Evans-Brown, (the movie Finster, Savage In Limbo), Bess Miller, (Sonia in Michael Puzzo's Uncle Vanya, Hamlet in Hamlet), Ryan Natalino, ( Ophelia, the movie Conjuring the Devil), Irene Rivera, (Law & Order: SVU), Serena Marie Williams, (Black Nativity and Death of a Salesman).

Bunnies is directed by Artistic Director, Frank Licato, produced and Set Designed by Gregory Erbach, co-founder and actor, Dawn D'Arrigo, stage manager, Tyler C. Hieb, lighting design, Donald Stark, original music and sound and Ann Lowe, costumes.