Reading of THE ZERO HOUR Slated for Diversionary on March 8

Diversionary Theatre will do a reading of Madeleine George's play The Zero Hour on Monday, March 8 at 7:30pm at the Theatre (one night only!). The reading will be performed by Amanda Sitton and Jacque Wilke, and directed by Dan Kirsch, Diversionary's Executive & Artistic Director.

O and Rebecca want love to be all they need, but the fact that Rebecca has not yet come out to her mother is threatening their happiness. Meanwhile, Rebecca's classroom teachings of the Holocaust are seeping into her evening subway rides, in this tour-de-force with two actresses playing all the roles. The Zero Hour was developed at PlayLabs, New Dramatists, New York Theatre Workshop and O'Neill Playwrights Conference.

Madeleine George is a playwright, fiction writer, and teacher. She is a founding member of the OBIE-Award-winning theater company 13P (Thirteen Playwrights, Inc.), a collective of playwrights devoted to producing their own plays on their own artistic terms. For many years Madeleine taught writing at New York University. She has also taught writing, in various forms, at Bard College, Barnard College, SUNY Purchase, the University of Rochester, a half-dozen New York City public schools, and a variety of correctional and alternative-to-incarceration facilities, including the Office of the Brooklyn DA, the Women's Prison Association, and Riker's Island. She is currently site director of a college program at a prison for women in Manhattan.

Madeleine has been a MacDowell Fellow, a Princess Grace Playwriting Fellow, and a Manhattan Theatre Club Playwriting Fellow. She has also been a nanny, a tanning-bed spritzer, an English teacher in Moscow, a copyeditor of trade paperbacks about killer yetis, a corporate librarian, an editor of PowerPoint presentations for pharmaceutical executives, and a tap dance teacher. She grew up in Western Massachusetts and now lives in New York City.

Started in 1986, the mission of Diversionary Theatre is to produce plays with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender themes that portray characters in their complexity and diversity both historically and contemporarily. The Zero Hour is part of Diversionary's Queer Theatre - Taking Center Stage play development program. The program honors the ideas, the energy and commitment people have made to tell LGBT stories.

Tickets for the reading are now on sale through the Diversionary Theatre Box Office. General admission tickets are $12 ($9 for Diversionary subscribers). Call the Box Office at 619.220.0097 or visit the website at www.diversionary.org.