Alumni Bianca Sams thesis play Rust on Bone will be read as part of Babes With Blades Fighting Words Series. The reading will take place this Sunday, July 12th at Noon in Chicago! !!! There will be another developmental reading with the company this September!
Babes with Blades is an awesome woman friendly company that strives to work with female playwrights and tell story stories with strong female protagonists! Here is their mission: Babes With Blades Theatre Company uses stage combat to place women and their stories center stage. Through performance, script development, training, and outreach, our ensemble creates theatre that explores the wide range of the human experience, and cultivates broader perspectives in the arts community and in society as a whole. Congrats Bianca on this awesome development opportunity!! If you’re in Chicago, you best check it out!!
Details
Babes with Blades Theater
Sunday, July 12th, 12pm
Heartland Studio 7016 N. Glenwood
More info on the Fighting Words Series with Babes with Blades
Playwrights selected for the Fighting Words program will receive a set of three readings to facilitate the development of their script. Each play will be assigned a director who will take part in the development process from the start. All readings and moderated talk backs are videotaped and given to the playwright to aid with rewrites.
The first reading is internal and is attended by company members and the director; the playwright is invited but not sponsored. The second reading is an advertised public reading; the playwright is invited but not sponsored. The final reading is an advertised public reading with one choreographed fight and a reception following the moderated talk back; the playwright’s travel expenses will be sponsored up to $400 to attend. The playwright is given approximately two months between drafts for revisions with a schedule provided at the time of selection.
BACKGROUND: Many scripts have completed the Fighting Words program since its inception, and several have gone on to full productions with the Babes.
R.L. Nesvet’s The Girl in the Iron Mask was selected for BWBTC’s 2006-07 season and was produced at the Raven Theatre, March – April 2007. Jennifer L. Mickelson’s The Last Daughter of Oedipus was produced at the Lincoln Square Theatre in August – September 2010, as the opening show in BWBTC’s 2010-11 season. Barbara Lhota’s The Double launched BWBTC’s 2011-12 season with a production in fall 2011. Reina Hardy’s Susan Swayne and the Bewildered Bride opened BWBTC’s 15th Anniversary season, 2012-13, in fall 2012. Eric Simon’s Bo Thomas and the Case of the Sky Pirates and Aaron Adair’s L’Imbecile premiered during BWBTC’s 2013-14 season.
More about Bianca
If the theater is a cultural and social crossroad in our society — a place where disparate ideas and values meet, collide and diverge again, — then Bianca’s plays are violent intersections that force audiences to face their own complex love affair with misery. She writes plays to create understanding between people of all cultural backgrounds by asking them to wrestle with the traumatic things in life that can simultaneously pull us apart and hold us together as humans. ” Because, let’s face it, no matter your cultural or sociopolitical background, shit happens and that fact makes pain a great equalizer.” Bianca’s work examines what happens when characters meet at these perilous crossroads in their lives.
As a female playwright of color, she is drawn to stories that question the roles of women, ethnicity, and family in modern society, that deal with the search for self in the collective identity and which explore underlying connective threads of mankind. Bianca weaves hot button social issues into her work because growing up in the politically active San Francisco Bay Area instilled a drive to create art that “holds as it ‘twere a mirror up to nature”. She hopes that through watching a dynamic dramatization of these issues unfold before their eyes, she will engage the audience in a visceral manner that convicts them to do something about it. You can see the fingerprints of her approach in her full length plays, At The Rivers End, Battle Cry, Rust On Bone, Black. Irish., Just Porgy, Rise Phoenix Rise and Summer Nights & Fireflies.
Awards and honors include KCACTF Lorraine Hansberry (2nd place), Rosa Parks Award (2nd place), Kennedy Center/Eugene O’Neill New Play Conference fellow, Jane Chambers Student Playwright Award/Athe (2nd Place), Scott McPherson Playwright Award, The Playwright Center Core Apprentice (2014), Playwright Foundation BAPF (finalist), Eugene O’Neill NPC (semi-finalist), TRI Research Fellowship at Ohio State University, Nashville Rep/Ingram New Works Lab Playwright-in-residence , Warner Brothers TV Writers Workshop, and T. S. Eliot Acting Fellowship. Click HERE for a copy of Bianca’s Artistic Statement.
