New Play Café reading series – donations at door

Six new plays by Pacific Northwest playwrights, selected from 75 submissions, are featured in the launch of the New Play Café reading series, presented by Bellingham TheatreWorks. The New Play Café continues Bellingham TheatreWorks mission to produce stories of significance to the Pacific Northwest, with an emphasis on local actors, directors, and playwrights.

The inaugural New Play Café series is March 3,4,5 and 10,11,12 at 7:30 pm at the New Prospect Theatre, 207 Prospect Street, Bellingham. Donations are accepted for admission.

The plays will have one or two rehearsals, and are presented without staging, props or sets.  The actors are at music stands, reading from the script.
“This is an exciting new step for Bellingham TheatreWorks, (BTW), one that’s been made possible thanks to our expanded community-member board,” said Mark Kuntz, BTW artistic director. “My producing partner Steve Lyons and I have both written and directed plays for BTW in the past. Now we have the organizational capacity to expand our programs to showcase and celebrate the work of emerging local artists and foster their growth.”

The playwrights come from throughout the Pacific Northwest, including two from Bellingham, two from Seattle, one from Camano Island, and one from Portland.

Themes in the plays include the complexities of family dynamics, and monsters; an exploration of sex, power and unrequited love; belonging, connection, and the barriers we experience with each; and, two plays inspired by real events: one of a famous Seattle Madam and a second play about a lighthouse keeper.

Saturday, March 4^th

Crazy Quilts by Karen Fix Curry
A young woman goes to interview a quilting group and finds herself being interviewed for inclusion in their exclusive secret club. Will she join their pay-it-forward group and help solve her problem?

Karen Fix Curry’s work has been produced across the United States and internationally and has been published by Smith & Kraus and Next Stage Press. Her voice as a writer is women-centric: what it is to be a woman in today’s society, how mental illness destroys a person and their relationships, how being older doesn’t mean your life isn’t rich and complicated, how friends can often do far more to help than the legal system will. She wants other people who see and hear her stories to feel something, and to leave discussing how it changed their view.  Ms. Curry is a member of The Dramatists Guild of America, Honor Roll, an advocacy and action group of women playwrights over 40, New Play Exchange, Plays on Purpose, a national playwriting group, Orange County Playwrights Alliance, CA, Page to Stage Playwriting Group, Anacortes and ASCAP. She lives on Camano Island.