Raging Skillet
by Jacques Lamarre, based on the memoir of the same title by Chef Rossi
Monday, December 17 at 7pm (Join the WAIT LIST!)
Tickets are free. Reservations recommended.

Featuring Lee Mikeska Gardner, Greg Maraio and Annette Miller.

Chef Rossi, the punk rock kitchen goddess and New York’s #1 rebel anti-caterer, has gathered friends and admirers to the theatre to celebrate the launch of her first-ever memoir, The Raging Skillet. Acting as Master of Ceremonies, DJ Skillit gets the crowd pumped for Rossi’s party where she will tell stories from the book and perform a cooking demo of some of her white-trash treats. Things immediately begin to unravel with the unanticipated arrival of her long-dead mother who has come all the way back from the afterlife to “kvell” over her daughter’s accomplishments. We hopscotch from Rossi’s childhood growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home in New Jersey to Manhattan to discover her true calling. No longer willing to put up with the sexism of the male-dominated professional kitchen, Rossi launches her own business – The Raging Skillet – and establishes her reputation as a feminist culinary commando.

Sex and Other Disturbances
by Marisa Smith
Tuesday, December 4 at 7pm (RSVP Online)
Tickets are free. Reservations recommended.

Featuring Celeste Oliva, Lee Mikeska Gardner, and Joshua Coleman.

It’s the fall of 2018 and a storm with no end is pummeling Manhattan and so are a variety of extreme midlife crises for the characters in Sex and other Disturbances. When your husband is too busy buying cabins in Newfoundland for the apocalypse, what’s the harm in having a little affair? Sarah, a former actress and now stay-at-home Mom and woman on the verge, finds out the hard way in this fast-paced comedy about friendship, love, sex, and other disturbances.

Proserpine, and its companion piece Midas
by Mary Shelly and Percy Bysshe Shelley
directed by Jessica Ernst
Tuesday, October 23 at 7pm (RSVP Online)
Tickets are free. Reservations recommended.

Proserpine, and its companion piece Midas, by Mary Shelly and Percy Bysshe Shelley is a verse drama written for children. Mary wrote the blank verse drama and Percy contributed two lyric poems. Composed in 1820 while the Shelleys were living in Italy, Proserpine was first published in the London periodical The Winter’s Wreath in 1832. The drama is based on Ovid’s tale of the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto, which itself was based on the Greek myth of Demeterand Persephone. Mary Shelley’s version focuses on the female characters. In a largely feminist retelling from Ceres’s point of view, Shelley emphasizes the separation of mother and daughter and the strength offered by a community of women. The genres of the text also reflect gender debates of the time. Percy contributed in the lyric verse form traditionally dominated by men; Mary created a drama with elements common to early nineteenth-century women’s writing: details of everyday life and empathetic dialogue. Proserpine is part of a female literary tradition which, as feminist literary critic Susan Gubar describes it, has used the story of Ceres and Proserpine to “re-define, to re-affirm and to celebrate female consciousness itself”

Learn more about Jessica Ernst.

Mary Shelley
by Helen Edmunson
Monday, October 22 at 7pm (RSVP Online)
Tickets are free. Reservations recommended.

Mary Shelley by Helen Edmunson centers on a crucial episode in Mary’s early life. Her parents were radical feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and political philosopher William Godwin. After Wollstonecraft’s death, the family, now joined by stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont and her daughter, Fanny, are struggling under the weight of heavy debts. When young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley becomes a regular visitor to the house, his financial stability and dangerous charisma charms the family, especially Godwin’s three young daughters. But it is feisty young Mary who becomes the object of his affections. The play details their scandalous elopement when Mary was just sixteen and the impact it has upon her stepmother, her sisters and above all, her troubled father. Three years after this life-changing event, Mary would write one of the greatest novels in the English language, Frankenstein, which changed the literary landscape forever.

Learn more about Adrienne Boris.

The Memoirs of Antonina
by Mary Bichner
Sunday, September 2 at 7pm (RSVP Online)
Tickets are free. Reservations recommended.

The Memoirs of Antonina is a new/in­progress three­act opera by composer Mary
Bichner, inspired by Marie Antoinette of France. Taking its name from a slanderous
18th­century pamphlet about the queen’s rumored exploits and indiscretions, The
Memoirs of Antonina focuses on the final years of Marie Antoinette’s life, and pits two
versions of the queen (performed by two different singers) against one another: the
imagined breezy libertine derided by revolutionary pamphleteers, and the distraught

historical figure determined to reclaim her kingdom and her reputation. The opera also
sets the stylistic conventions of opera buffa (Antonina) against those of opera seria
(Antoinette), resulting in a work that explores both the exasperatingly comic — and
profoundly tragic — elements of Marie Antoinette’s story.

Learn more about Mary Bichner.