A FREE, UNSULLIED LAND Gets Devised Theater PlayLab, Reading This Month in NYC

Guided by members of Hook & Eye Theater company (God is a Verb, The Summoners), Devised Theater PlayLab participants will collaborate to create short plays, songs, and movement based on the text of Maggie Kast's debut novel, A FREE, UNSULLIED LAND, its characters, and setting.

Artists and the public alike encouraged to attend. Performance, wine reception and fellowship follows. It all takes place at the TAI Group, 150 West 30th St., 14th floor, New York 10001 on February 22, 2016, featuring a reading by the author followed by a Q&A session from 6 to 7 p.m. before the performance.

Hook & Eye Theater is an ensemble company of theater-makers, actors, dancers, musicians and artists based in Brooklyn, NY. They build totally new theatrical pieces full of joyful athleticism, soul, and song. They teach play-writing at New York's Professional Performing Arts School, and offer 100% free PlayLabs where new work is brought forward, built and developed. The mission of Hook & Eye is to build inspiring and inquisitive theater productions to embolden audiences of every age. They are committed to compensating their artists for their work, and offering low-or no-cost tickets to audiences and students.

Maggie Kast's debut novel, A Free, Unsullied Land (Fomite Press, November 1, 2015) combines a compassionate portrayal of a young woman's struggle to escape an abusive home with an incisive depiction of a critical moment in history. Beginning in Chicago, 1930, the novel transports nineteen-year-old Henriette Greenberg into the heart of the Jim Crow South to protest the conviction of the so-called Scottsboro Boys and later to New Mexico where she does fieldwork among the Apache. There she witnesses a funeral ritual that gives her hope of rewriting her family story. Devoted to her gay brothers, Henriette struggles against the self-deceptions of family and society in an era when pansy clubs co-exist with persecution of "inverts."

From Henriette's horror at injustice to her renewal of hope, Kast's vivid but sensitive prose gives epic proportions to a story of coming of age. "Few novels have so powerfully evoked the longing -- and the hope -- of individuals at the juncture in which their culture's delusions are crumbling," says Kevin McIlvoy, author of 58 Octaves Below Middle C. "In the most surprising and most wonderful ways, it is an epic novel."

Kast's characters are based on her parents and the period and place of their meeting, but all of their adventures are fictional. Other historical characters and places contribute to the fictional dream: Theodore Dreiser, Dorothy Parker, and W.E.B. Dubois. Carefully researched, the novel invites readers into a decade of depression and abandon, from the Stock Market Crash to the end of Prohibition and the run-up to war.

Kast's first career was in dance, and her non-fiction book, The Crack between the Worlds: a dancer's memoir of loss, faith and family, chronicles her loss of a child and the spiritual journey that followed, viewed through the lens of her life as dancer, wife and mother. She received an M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published fiction in The Sun, Nimrod, Carve, Paper Street and others. Her essays have appeared in America, Image, Writer's Chronicle and elsewhere. A chapter of her memoir won a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council and a Pushcart nomination.

"Maggie Kast has a terrific ear for speech and a sharp eye for the differences and similarities between depression-era and contemporary lives. Her energetic novel holds us riveted on the cusp between," says Rosellen Brown, author of Tender Mercies and Before and After.