Women Centre Stage: Eight Short Plays By and About Women

by Sue Parrish (Editor), Georgia Christou, April De Angelis

Eight short plays, commissioned and developed as part of the Women Centre Stage Festival, that together demonstrate the range, depth and richness of women’s writing for the stage.

Selected by Sue Parrish, Artistic Director of Sphinx Theatre, these plays offer a wide variety of rewarding roles for women, and are perfect for schools, youth groups and theatre companies to perform.

How to Not Sink by Georgia Christou looks at duty, love and dependency across three generations of women.

In Wilderness by April De Angelis, a patient and her psychiatrist head into the wilderness to find out how sane any of us really are.

In Chloe Todd Fordham’s The Nightclub, three very different women at a gay nightclub in Orlando are caught up in a terrifying hate crime.

Fucking Feminists by Rose Lewenstein is a fiercely funny investigation of what feminism means, and what it has become.

Winsome Pinnock’s Tituba is a one-woman show about Tituba Indian, the enslaved woman who played a central role in the seventeenth-century Salem Witch Trials.

In The Road to Huntsville by Stephanie Ridings, a writer researching women who fall in love with men on death row finds herself crossing the line.

White Lead by Jessica Siân explores the expectations and responsibilities of being an artist and a woman.

In What is the Custom of Your Grief? by Timberlake Wertenbaker, an English schoolgirl whose brother has been killed on active duty in Afghanistan is befriended online by an Afghan girl.

Sphinx Theatre has been at the vanguard of promoting, advocating and inspiring women in the arts through productions, conferences and research for more than forty years.

Genres: Plays

179 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 7, 2016

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like a 3.5. Some of these plays I really loved, and some not so much.

[Carmilla Voiez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these. I read the book for a course I was doing with the OU and it helped me get to grip with what limits were needed to make a short stage play work. I read it again for pleasure and some really stood out, including - How Not to Sink by Georgia Christou, a play about three generations of women and the expectations of motherhood; Wilderness by April De Angelis, about a psychiatrist and her patient; and The Nightclub by Chloe Todd Fordham, about three women (again of different generations but this time not related by blood) caught up in the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016.

[Cora · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed quite a few of the plays in this, particularly "The Nightclub" and "The Road to Huntsville". I thought that the nightclub was done extremely well, and that it was incredibly moving. Huntsville was the other main one I enjoyed, I thought that it was a really interesting concept, and shows how easy it is to fall into ideologies you don't believe in.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some very nice plays, I particularly liked the nightclub one.