Due to stuff that happens, “Rural Free Delivery” by Grace Epstein is postponed until October 2016.
Playwright Grace Epstein
On April 1, 2016, a new play, RURAL FREE DELIVERY written by a local Kentucky/Ohio playwright, who teaches English and Film at the University of Cincinnati, opens on The Avenue Stage in Bellevue, Ky. Grace Epstein has been writing dialogue since she was ten years old, but didn’t understand what to do with it until she minored in drama at Kentucky Wesleyan College in Owensboro, Ky. She continued writing for the stage while working on her MA in Creative and Dramatic Writing and her PhD in Literature and Narrative at Ohio State University.
RURAL FREE DELIVERY has been a work-in-progress for five years since her sense of social and moral consciousness peaked and she realized that lesbians were not being represented on stage. Then, three years ago, her daughter had a premature child by C-section. She was astonished that recovering from a C-section was so much worse than from her own experience of natural childbirth. Her youngest child was delivered at home and even though it was a breach birth, it was far less painful than a C-section.
In the 1970’s, The Home Birth Movement began in the United States. Grace was quickly drawn to the idea that women need to support each other in childbirth and throughout their lives. Before that time, women were not encouraged to breast feed or to have children at home.
Epstein’s play, RURAL FREE DELIVERY, merges these life experiences with many important issues of the day: womens’ right to choose the best outcome for her own body, mixed racial marriages, gay marriage, and the political and cultural differences between rural folk and big city sophisticates. It takes place in Western Kentucky’s mining country where trudging through 25 inches of snow to help another woman is the natural thing to do.
In this dramatic comedy, a lesbian couple has moved from a northern U.S. climate to a small, western Kentucky homestead. Hava (played by Leah Heisel) is a Jewish biologist at a local university and the very pregnant Shirese (Burgess Byrd) is an African-American English teacher at the same university. Joined by Hava’s straight sister, Lyla (Hannah Goodman), and a middle-aged, all-things-Kentucky, hands on woman (Liberty Fraysure), the four of them are both prepared and unprepared for 25 inches of snow, the onset of labor, and the secret about Lyla’s mother.
WIT-Women in Theatre is dedicated to producing and performing plays by, for, and about women. Giving women the work they need and want on and behind stage helps bridge the gap caused by the fact that only 37% of all jobs in film and theatre are given to women of all races. They are constantly searching for emerging female playwrights with a Feminist point of view.
“WIT doesn’t do theatre just to say we put on a show, we do theatre to have a conversation and to learn.” Look for us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/WIT.Women.in.Theatre.
RURAL FREE DELIVERY is directed by Marta Backman Hyland and will run April 1, 2, 5, 8, 9 at The Avenue Stage, 520 Fairfield Ave., Bellevue, KY, 41073. The Avenue Stage is on the St. John United Church of Christ building. Tickets will be available around March 1 on-line at: https://stjohnchurch.net. There will also be tickets sold at the door.
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