The Zig Zag Festival to Showcase Female Playwrights at Annex Theatre, 8/4-19

Annex Theatre is thrilled to present The Zig Zag Festival in which six playwrights -- all female, all young, all local -- collaborate on an evening of short works. Each is playwright of one play, director for another, and an outside eye for a third.

Despite the fact that women make up more than half of our population, they are woefully underrepresented in American theatre. The Zig Zag Festival is an experiment to bring together young female playwrights and directors to work together as collaboraters and individuals.

The Zig Zag Festival was conceived of and curated by Catherine Blake Smith. Rather than follow the traditional festival model of asking for play submissions, Smith invited artists to come to the table and write new plays while working as part of a team. Each woman brings her unique voice as a playwright and vision as a director to the stage.

Each play is a world premiere. Catherine Blake Smith (Spin the Bottle) and L. Nicol Cabe (Second Date) write and direct futuristic alt-world plays that challenge our expectations of traditional structures like a board game and a cooking show. Courtney Meaker (Chaos Theory) and Dayo Anderson (Libertinis' Gone Wild) show us horrors in reality: a post-apolocalyptic world and an absurdly honest job interview. Seayoung Yim and Amy Escobar portray familiar and beautiful stories like lovers in a 1930s gangster gang and a girl's worst nightmares.

Cast from an ensemble of actors, each of whom is featured in two plays, The Zig Zag Festival offers a small step towards gender parity and a fantastic collection of new work in one entrancing evening.

Annex Theatre is a democratic collective of theatre artists dedicated to creating bold new work in an environment of improbability, resourcefulness, and risk. Annex Theatre produces new plays by living playwrights, radical reinterpretations of classic scripts, and ensemble-generated non-linear spectacles. Now in its Capitol Hill venue, Annex originally opened its doors in 1987 in a former dance studio on 4th Avenue in downtown Seattle. Since then the theater has produced hundreds of world and Northwest premieres.

The Zig Zag Festival performs August 4-19th on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 8 pm. Tickets are $5-$10. For tickets and more info visit www.annextheatre.org. Annex Theatre is located at 1100 E. Pike Street, Seattle, WA.

Playwright-Directors:

Catherine Blake Smith
Dayana "Dayo" Anderson
L. Nicol Cabe
Amy Escobar
Courtney Meaker
Seayoung Yim

Ensemble:

Kiki Abba
Devon Allen
Isabela de Campos
Rachel Delmar
Katie Driscoll
Nathaniel Leeson
Jordi Montes
Tatiana Pavela
Cody Smith
Sydney Tucker

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