Dawn Ursula News

When the world you've known your whole life starts falling apart due to forces outside of your control, are you able to roll with the punches? When the bubble you've lived in for years starts imploding upon itself due to the choices made by others, are you able to move forward with compassion and understanding? What if the impact of those choices is caused by your friend? Or even your own mother? These are the questions audience members will ask themselves when they step into the world of Reading, Pennsylvania to see Sweat at Everyman Theatre.

This industrial Eden will not end well. And end badly it does, as playwright Lynn Nottage tightens the grip of the catastrophe step by slow step. We all know the historical outlines of the story enough to have a general idea what to expect: management ready to break unions to exact wage and benefits concessions, scab laborers, jobs exported abroad, plant closures, mortgage foreclosures, destitution, opioids. But Nottage renders this familiar tale powerful and surprising.

From its origins in the painstakingly researched fieldwork of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage comes Sweat- the gritty, emotionally charged story of friendships and hardships in post-industrial small-town America. Hailed by The New York Times as "an extraordinarily moving drama" that "brims with the kind of ripe, richly imagined life associated with the work of the great August Wilson," the show's Baltimore debut runs October 23-November 25, 2018 and is directed by Everyman Theatre Founding Artistic Director Vincent M. Lancisi.

Featuring a compelling script, some of the best acting you're bound to see anywhere locally (most notably from Jon Hudson Odom) under the swift and inspired direction by Marti Lyons, and strong production elements (even music!), this is an unpredictable "only at Woolly" experience you won't want to miss. It's especially perfect for Pride Month.

Furthering its established, 27-year reputation for best-in-class subscriber loyalty and exceptional artistic achievement, Everyman Theatre proudly announces its 2018/19 Season-a gloriously compelling showcase for the esteemed Resident Company which celebrates exciting new voices in playwriting alongside long-celebrated masters of the form.

Theatre has always been a lens through which to view the current world. Productions such as RENT, illuminated issues like the AIDS crisis in ways that hadn't been seen before on a stage. Audiences confronted these issues in a very real way, and one would hope that they learned and grew from the experience. We're in another turning point in time right now, in the midst of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements. Women are standing up and resisting in droves. It's a powerful statement on the endurance and the drive of women. So it seems only fitting, that for the third year, Everyman Theatre is producing a SALON SERIES of readings of plays written by women, and directed by women, allowing the women of the company to "stretch that directing muscle" and take a step outside of their comfort zone.

The second annual Women's Voices Theater Festival's first entry is the follow up to the hit play Queens Girl in the World, an entry in the first festival in 2015.

Mosaic Theater presents Caleen Sinnette Jennings' QUEENS GIRL IN AFRICA, the sequel to her 2015 QUEENS GIRL IN THE WORLD. Set in the 1960s, this one-woman show tells the story of a young Jacqueline Marie Butler, who travels to Nigeria after Malcom X is assassinated. QUEENS GIRL IN AFRICA opened January 8th and runs through February 4th.

Everyman Theatre's enormously popular Salon Series, celebrating the work of women playwrights, returns for its third edition with five powerful new plays, curated and directed by the women of Everyman Theatre's Resident Acting Company (Dawn Ursula, Beth Hylton, Deborah Hazlett and Megan Anderson), and hosted in the social setting of Everyman's second-floor rehearsal hall on select Monday evenings: February 5, February 19, March 5, March 19 and April 2, from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM.

Playwright Lauren Gunderson, who marches boldly where political correctness fears to tread, delivers a stylized rendition of female revolutionaries, one famous, two obscure, one invented, reminding us that history is not only written by the victors, it's written by men. Director Casey Stangl presents a snappy, suspenseful, tense drama that is curiously chock-full of comedy. Everyman's resident actors and supporting artists are gifted in their range and variety.

Erich Hatch, Director of Programming for the SNF Parkway Theater and the Maryland Film Festival hopes this program will enhance the enjoyment of its plays at the Everyman Theatre.

Ready, aim, spitfire! Everyman Theatre prepares for audiences (and heads) to be rolling in the aisles with the astutely timed arrival of The Revolutionists (December 6, 2017 through January 7, 2018) from playwright Lauren Gunderson aka the most-produced playwright in the country (The New Yorker).

Ready, aim, spitfire! Everyman Theatre prepares for audiences (and heads) to be rolling in the aisles with the astutely timed arrival of The Revolutionists (December 6, 2017 through January 7, 2018) from playwright Lauren Gunderson aka the most-produced playwright in the country (The New Yorker).

Everyman Theatre's production of INTIMATE APPAREL has been gaining rave reviews over the past few weeks. Their production of the Lynn Nottage work is not only wonderful, but also beautifully performed by a small cast of extremely talented actors. Dawn Ursula, who plays Esther whom the play revolves around gives a powerhouse performance. She's run through a gamut of emotions throughout the play and she does so flawlessly.

There seems to be a constant in Lynn Nottage's plays: the reality that people of color and women do not get many breaks or many chances for happiness or fulfillment. Whatever they do achieve along these lines is both hard-won and partial. In fact, that constant reality of limits on the available economic opportunity and on the available happiness is precisely the theme of Intimate Apparel. Heroine Esther (Dawn Ursula), being both black and female, looks for fulfillment in love, in friendship, and in work (as a seamstress and lingerie maker), and it seems at the end that she has obtained about all of any of these that is on offer.

As though tailor-made for the locally-commissioned play's Baltimore audience, Intimate Apparel stirs with substance, style and sincerity at Everyman Theatre October 18 through November 19, 2017 in a quietly commanding production that radiates with powerful performances on-stage and profound local partnerships off-stage, bringing the play's delicate themes affectingly to life.

Everyman Theatre and the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF) have announced 'Everyman at the Parkway,' a season-long partnership and six-part screening series that will bring influential films to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway in conjunction with Everyman Theatre's 2017/18 season.

Everyman Theatre and the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF) have announced 'Everyman at the Parkway,' a season-long partnership and six-part screening series that will bring influential films to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway in conjunction with Everyman Theatre's 2017/18 season.

It truly is one of the funniest plays I've ever seen.

Everyman Theatre's Resident Company of actors transforms into a British company of actors during the 1970s in this hotly anticipated revival of Tony Award-Winner Michael Frayn's side-splitting farce to end all farces, Noises Off, directed by Founding Artistic Director Vincent M. Lancisi and running from May 17 through June 18, 2017.