Babes With Blades Theater Company Announces An Extended FIGHTING WORDS FESTIVAL In 2023, June 17 - 25

Babes With Blades Theatre Company's (BWBTC) 2023 season opens with an extended run of its new works festival, collectively called Fighting Words, June 17- 25 at The Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa. All performances are free to the public and audiences can provide feedback on the scripts following each reading. For more information, tickets and live performance streaming information, visit BabesWithBlades.org. Registration for tickets is available Thursday, June 1 at 12 p.m.

"Chicago's theater industry is a hub for the development of new works for theatre across the nation, and Babes With Blades Theatre Company is proud to be a part of that larger legacy," states Artistic Director Hayley Rice."We are elated to be working with three accomplished and award-winning playwrights from inside and outside of our ensemble. Rachel Lynett and Desi Moreno-Penson each brings us a story that expands the boundaries of what our audiences expect from BWBTC, with Rich B*tch and Sin Agua respectively.The Gatekeepers was the winner of the 2021 Margaret W. Martin Award for our international playwriting competition, Joining Sword & Pen. Since the Joining Sword & Pen is a blind submission process, we were surprised and delighted that it was written by BWBTC Ensemble Member Jillian Leff." continues Rice.

FIGHTING WORDS FESTIVAL

JUNE 17-25

Performance Running Time: TBA

All performances will take place at The Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa with a Q+A session immediately following each reading. Live streaming is available for Saturday, June 24 and Sunday, June 25 readings. More information at BabesWithBlades.org.

Rich B*tch

by Rachel Lynett

Saturday, June 17 at 2:30 p.m.

Saturday, June 24 at 7:30 p.m.

Dani agrees to spend a weekend with her rich friends to celebrate her best friend's wedding as a sort of "bachelor party" but no one was expecting the various proverbial (and literal) cuts they would ultimately cause each other as they navigate what is required and expected in order to be a rich b*tch who is also a woman of color.

Sin Agua

by Desi Moreno-Penson

Sunday, June 18 at 2:30 p.m.

Saturday, June 24 at 2:30 p.m.

Amanita, the mushroom chef, wants to open her own restaurant in Mexico City. But it's raining. The rain is called The Spate and it carries disease. The other chefs want to leave, the enigmatic ghost of her mother wants her to find the mushroom fields of the Aztlán Gods, called El Medio, and an eccentric mushroom supplier wants to devour every mushroom in sight. What's a girl to do with such a kitchen nightmare?

The Gatekeepers

by BWBTC Ensemble Member Jillian Leff

Saturday, June 17 at 7:30pm

Sunday, June 25 at 2:30pm

Taking place in a distant future where the United States has undergone sweeping reform: Guns are banned, healthcare is free and numerous tax and economic bills have helped lessen the division of classes and pulled millions out of poverty. Sloane (first name Bridget, but don't call her that) is a young woman who has been tapped by a watchdog intelligence agency called the CRC, led by the odd, yet domineering William Hale. As Sloane triumphantly (and a little drunkenly) leaves a warehouse after signing her contract, she is stopped by a mysterious woman who says she has come back in time to stop Sloane from making the biggest mistake of her life.

Rachel Lynett is a queer Afro-Latine playwright, producer and teaching artist. Their plays have been featured at San Diego Rep, Magic Theatre, Mirrorbox Theatre, Laboratory Theatre of Florida, Barrington Stage Company, Theatre Lab, Theatre Prometheus, Florida Studio Theatre, Laughing Pig Theatre Company, Capital Repertory Theatre, Teatro Espejo, the Kennedy Center Page to Stage festival, Theatresquared, Equity Library Theatre-Chicago, Talk Back Theatre, American Stage Theatre Company, Indiana University at Bloomington, Edgewood College and Orlando Shakespeare Theatre. Their plays Last Night and He Did It made the 2020 Kilroy's List. Lynett is also the 2021 recipient of the Yale Drama Prize for their play, Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry (You Too August Wilson). They were the 2021 recipient of the National Latinx Playwriting award and the runner-up for the 2022 Miranda Family Voices Latinx Playwriting Competition for their play, Black Mexican. Their play, White People by the Lake was also a 2022 Blue Ink Award finalist. They have previously taught at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Alfred University. Lynett was recently a staff writer for The Winchesters and is working on an upcoming feature.

Desi Moreno-Penson is a playwright, actor, dramaturg and independent theater producer based in New York City. She has an MFA in dramaturgy and theater criticism from Brooklyn College. Her plays have been developed/produced at Ensemble Studio Theater (EST), INTAR, MultiStages, Perishable Theater (Providence, RI), SPF-Summer Play Festival, terraNOVA Collective, Downtown Urban Theater Festival (DUTF) @the Cherry Lane, Urban Theater Company (Chicago), Teatro Coribantes (San Juan, PR), among others. She is the Instructor for Classics In Color, an online new play development course sponsored by Dramatic Question Theater (DQT) for BIPOC playwrights interested in creating modern adaptations of classical works. Her short play, Dead Wives Dance the Mambo was featured as part of The Chain One-Act Festival at the Chain Theater, directed by KM Jones. Her new play, EL BACALAO: The Catfish Man, a Latinx retelling of Euripedes' The Bacchae, was selected for the 2021 Fall Intensive Writers Group with Workshop Theater. Her play, Beige received a staged reading as part of the playwrights/directors unit (PDU) at The Actors Studio. In addition, Beige is the winner of the 2016 National Latinx Playwriting Award sponsored by the Arizona Theater Company and is a finalist for both the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (San Francisco, CA). She has twice won the MultiStages New Works Contest sponsored by MultiStages Theater Company for her plays, Ominous Men and Comida De Puta (F%&king Lousy Food); she has twice been a semifinalist for the Princess Grace Award and her work has received Honorable Mention on The Kilroys List. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing; her short play, Reconcile, Bitchis included in the short plays anthology "Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2020," published by Applause Theater and Cinema Books; a ten-minute play, Spirit Sex: A Paranormal RomancE, was selected for the short plays anthology, "Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2010" and a scene from her play, Comida De Puta (F%&king Lousy Food) is included in an anthology featuring plays written by Latinx playwrights, "Scenes for Latinx Actors: Voices of the New American Theater," both published by Smith and Kraus.

Jillian Leff is a Chicago based playwright and actor. In the city, her plays have been produced by The New Coordinates (Small World, co-written with Joe Lino,2020 Jeff Award Nominee for New Work), The Cuckoo's Theater Project (Missed Opportunities) and The Right Brain Project ((Non)Fiction), while her short plays have been produced by Broken Nose Theatre, Random Acts Chicago and Ghostlight Ensemble, among others. She has a BFA in acting from Ball State University and is an ensemble member with Babes With Blades Theatre Company.

Fighting Words emerged from the very clear need to increase the canon of fighting roles for folks of marginalized genders. By establishing a development series for new works, BWBTC not only supports the creation of scripts that meet our mission and that we can produce, but scripts that can go beyond Chicago to increase the visibility of a wide variety of fierce folks on stage.

Each year since 2005, BWBTC selects three scripts for development that have the potential to grow into the kinds of plays that fit its mission. Several of the Fighting Words selections have been seen as full productions with BWBTC, as well as other theatre companies: most recently Women of 4G, 180 Degree Rule, Patchwork Drifter, L'Imbecile, Promise of a Rose Garden (Jeff Recommended,) Bo Thomas and the Case of the Sky Pirates and The Lady Demands Satisfaction (Jeff Recommended).

Each 2022-2023 script has undergone two reading-and-feedback sessions with the ensemble and invited guests. BWBTC then presents the final reading of each script in the Fighting Words Festival.

The Joining Sword & Pen international playwriting competition launched in 2005 to generate more scripts that featured women in roles involving stage combat. Created in collaboration with artistic advisor and fight master in the Society of American Fight Directors David Woolley who sponsors the competition, scripts inspired by a specific image are submitted

and go through a blind judging process. The winning script goes through BWBTC's new

play development program,receives a full production, cash prize and the Margaret W. Martin Award.

Margaret W. Martin was ahead of her time. In the 1960s and 1970s, she maintained her full time job, taught piano and raised a family of six children (four girls, two boys) all while she traveled the globe from the United States to Saudi Arabia, across Europe and Vientiane Laos during the height of the Vietnam War. She founded the American International School - Riyadh (K-12) in Saudi Arabia in 1963 and it has flourished as an institution since then. The Margaret W. Martin Award is in honor of Artistic advisor and Society of American Fight Directors fight master David Woolley's mother.

Babes With Blades Theatre Company - for over the past 20 years, and moving into the future - strives to develop and present scripts focused on complex, dynamic (often combative) characters who continue to be underrepresented on theatre stages based on gender. Babes With Blades Theatre Company uses (and will continue to use) stage combat to tell stories that elevate the voices of underrepresented communities and dismantle the patriarchy.

In each element of their programming, they embrace two key concepts:

1) Folks of marginalized genders and underrepresented communities are central to the story, driving the action rather than responding or submitting to it.

2) Everyone is capable of a full emotional and physical range, up to and including violence and its consequences.

The company offers participants and patrons alike an unparalleled opportunity to experience every person as heroes and villains; rescuers and rescues; right, wrong and everywhere in between: exciting, vivid, dynamic PEOPLE. It's as simple and as subversive as that.

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