Reading Club Shakespeare is Dead
The Reading Club is a group of theater makers, actors, writers and directors who regularly read play texts together. Texts are read aloud with a drink in hand. The texts can come from established writers, young authors, translations of international texts or even work in progress. Everyone can read and listen. The texts that are read are related to Shakespeare is Dead. Be welcome to the club and read with us.
Reading Club Shakespeare is Dead
Pieces that are read - March 24 Dutch, March 25 English
Friday March 24 – Underpass
We read this piece in the Dutch translation
About the writer
Si'an Chen is a writer, playwright, director, poet and literary translator. She was born in Inner Mongolia (China) and lives and works in Beijing (Beijing). She has six pieces to her name, including "Underpass", translated by Jeremy Tiang. She has published short story collections such as “Flame in the Body”, “Live Food”, “Fake Life”, “Next, I Ask, You Answer. She wrote dramas such as “Dream of Mortals”, “In the Wilderniss”, “Life in a Counterfeit, and directed several of these plays. She won the third Zhongshan Star Young Writer of the Year Award and the 12th Shanghai Literature Short Story award. Plays written and directed by her have been performed at the Royal Court Theatre, Edinburgh International Theater Festival, Shanghai Drama Art Center, China National Theatre, Beijing International Youth Theater Festival and City Theater Festival.
About the piece
In the depths of an underground subway in Beijing, a homeless mother struggles to protect her child. A disturbing panorama of the hidden underside of a city, which raises pressing questions about the value of human life in the urban jungle.
Saturday March 25 – Enormity, Girl, and the Earthquake in her Lungs
We will read the original English text together.
About the author
Chelsea Woolley is a Toronto playwright, interested in work that is large, rhythmic, and women-centric. Her play, Enormity, Girl, and the Earthquake in Her Lungs started development in 2017 as a part of Nightwood Theatre's Write from the Hip program. She has produced work nationally and internationally including a tour of her piece, The Mountain with Geordie Theatre. She has presented work in Belgium at the Shakespeare is Dead Festival, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. She is the creator of the Mixed-Arts Performance Partnership Program connecting young artists living in precarity with professional artist mentorship, and the Head of Drama with the Canadian Children's Opera Company. Chelsea is a graduate of the National Theater School of Canada's Playwriting Program. Her newest play, Paint Me This House of Love will premiere at the Tarragon Theatre.
About the piece - Enormity, Girl, and the Earthquake in her Lungs
The play takes place during the eight minutes a girl or woman has to wait alone in a crisis center. The characters are the voices and different personalities within herself. female gaze? Present!!!
Vic has arrived in a women's shelter. She has been told to make the bed and begin an intake. Make the bed, and speak. Yet sharing her story is an intolerable enormity for a brain in crisis. Vic and the six personified parts of her traumatized brain, struggle to confront what has happened to them, and commit to the refuge offered from a system often designed to remove a victim's personal agency over her legal, medical, psychological, and economic choices.