Please join us for a special event in the Spring 2016 Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette, in collaboration with the Department of Theatre: a staged reading of Successful Strategies, a new play by Andrea Stolowitz, twice winner of the Oregon Book Award for drama.
Produced by Theatre 33 and directed by Elisabeth Rothan, the reading will take place on Tuesday, March 15, at 7 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s library. It is free and open to the public and will be followed by a Q&A with the author.
Successful Strategies is a comedy inspired by the Marivaux play of the same name. The original play deals with the handlings, schemes, and strategies around trying to make love stay in 1733 Burgundy, France, the ancestral home of the Pinot Noir grape. Andrea’s play examines the same questions, but it takes place now, in Oregon, the North American home of Pinot Noir. It’s play about love, grape growing, and wine making in all of their individual and exquisite pains.
Andrea Stolowitz has been Willamette’s resident playwright since 2008, teaching classes in the Departments of English and Theatre. Her plays have been presented and developed at The Cherry Lane (NYC), The Old Globe (SD), The Long Wharf (CT), New York Stage and Film (NY), and Portland Center Stage (OR). The LA Times calls her work “heartbreaking” and the Orange County Register characterizes her approach as a “brave refusal to sugarcoat…issues and tough decisions.” A recipient of Artists Repertory Theater’s $25,000 New Play Commission, Andrea’s latest work Ithaka premiered at the theater in 2013 to critical acclaim. It had its mid-west premiere in 2014 in Chicago’s InFusion Theater. Her play Antarktikos world-premiered at The Pittsburgh Playhouse in March 2013 and was workshopped nationwide at The New Harmony Project (IN), Portland Center Stage’s JAW Festival, and at Seattle Repertory Theater. She also teaches playwriting and screenwriting at the University of Portland.
Listen to Andrea discussing Ithaka on OPB’s Think Out Loud here: http://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud/segment/ithaka-examines-life-returning-veterans/.
Scott Nadelson