Play Reading Series: Wonder Begins

Our play reading series this spring 2024 will connect to the season’s theme of Wonder and feature three new plays by local and regional playwrights. Each play will be cast with local actors, presented before a live audience, and followed by a talkback with the playwright.

Performances dates and details:

Thursday, April 11, 2024 at 7:00pm 
Holy Orders
by Susan E. Sneeringer 
Directed by Jody Reppert 

Thursday, April 25, 2024 at 7:00pm 
Prospect Hill 
by Bruce Walsh 
Directed by Kimberly Patterson 

Thursday, May 9, 2024 at 7:00pm 
Banshee 
by Adam Richter 
Directed by Sean Sassaman 

Thursday, May 16, 2024 at 7:00pm 
Arachnothology (A Study of Spiders) 
by Kimberly Patterson 
Directed by Andrea Kennedy Hart

About Holy Orders: 
Margaret Delany is a 65-year-old nun who is suspended from her order after serving Mass for a needy Louisiana parish. The diocese has ignored multiple requests for a priest to perform the ritual and Margaret rises to the task, prepared to suffer the consequences for breaking with her order and her church. She returns home for reflection and renewal. She needs to decide if she will continue with the order, taking its punishment for her disobedience, or resign and find another way to serve. She also has to wonder…was this rebellious act in response to an urgent need or was this urgent need a chance to ascend to her true vocation, the life of a Catholic priest?

About Prospect Hill: 
Prospect Hill takes place in a Midwest college town. Jacob runs an in-home, sliding-scale counseling practice, partly underwritten by Rex, his well-to-do husband. But when Rex sets his savior complex on Ethan, Jacob’s working-class, drug-addicted client, the couple’s relationship fractures — then suddenly flourishes — as all three men wrestle their addictions, grievances, false idols, and yearnings for a higher power. 

About Banshee: 
In 1798, a woman may have pushed a man to his death. In 2023, her descendant is trying to unravel the mystery of what happened centuries earlier. The ideas of ancestry, lineage and the supernatural are all explored in Banshee. The play is ostensibly a ghost story, and it explores is the question of what we inherit from our ancestors, especially when we don’t know anything about those who came before us.

About Arachnothology (A Study of Spiders): 
A study of spiders in written language: Arachne to Spider-Gwen. 90,000 species. Thirteen scenes. Arachnothology tracks the evolution of spiders through mythology, folklore, nursery rhymes, popular culture, and science to weave a tapestry about identity and choice—and whether or not it’s possible to start over.