Soul Rep and Echo Theatre Present the World Premiere of THE MONARCH

Soul Rep Theatre Company is ecstatic to collaborate with Echo Theatre in co-producing the world premiere of THE MONARCH, written by Soul Rep Co-Founder and area playwright, Anyika McMillan-Herod. The production is co-directed by McMillan-Herod and Tonya Holloway, Soul Rep's Co-Artistic Director and Co-Founder. The production will run June 15 - June 30 at the Bath House Cultural Center, located at 521 E. Lawther Drive, on the east shore of White Rock Lake.

With THE MONARCH, McMillan-Herod has turned her own personal experience with breast cancer into an inspiring, dark, warm, and sometime humorous exploration of the human spirit. Through this play, she has transformed pain into stirring theater. "I am so grateful for the opportunity to finally put this production on its feet," explains McMillan-Herod, who will be celebrating 10 years of remission from Stage 3 breast cancer later this month. "This has been my labor of love for the past six years and thanks to the generous support of my Soul Rep family and Echo Theatre, THE MONARCH is finally getting its wings!"

THE MONARCH has been through quite a bit of development, with its first staged reading six years ago at the South Dallas Cultural Center. It was further developed through the Dallas Theater Center's Dallas Playwrights Workshop, led by Will Power, in 2015. Excerpts from the play were featured in Soul Rep's 9th New Play Festival that same year. This past March, the latest iteration of THE MONARCH was featured in Echo Theatre's ECHO READS SERIES. This beautifully poetic play follows four breast cancer survivors. Each woman has her own story, her own emotional journey, and her own method of survival. "There was such an amazingly strong reaction to this play, that we decided to give it a full production," says Terri Ferguson, Artistic Director of Echo Theatre.

This past year, McMillan-Herod debuted three new short plays, including MIGRATION for House Party Theater's Damnsels! Play Festival and LIBERTY STREET and COMMUNION for Soul Rep's South Side Stories New Play Festival. She also adapted celebrated short stories by Alfredo Cardona Peña and Juan Rulfo, two giants of the Latino literary world, for Teatro Dallas' 2017 Day of the Dead production.

THE MONARCH will run at the Bath House Cultural Center June 15-16, June 21-23, and June 28-30. Performances are 8:00 PM each day, with the exception of an additional 2:00 PM matinee on Saturday, June 30. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at www.echotheatre.org. For more information, please visit Echo Theatre's website or www.soulrep.org.

Founded in April 1998, Echo Theatre is based in Dallas, Texas and has built a national reputation for excellence. It is the mission of Echo Theatre to produce the works of women playwrights in order to bridge the gender gap that persists in live theatre. Because the words of women playwrights are not heard on world stages as often as their male colleagues, Echo Theater produces plays written by women that everyone can enjoy. The plays we present are as different as the women who write them, so you'll enjoy a variety of entertainment. Learn more about Echo Theatre and upcoming productions at www.echotheatre.org

Soul Rep, founded in 1996 by Arts Magnet alumni Guinea Bennett-Price (Co-Artistic Director) and Anyika McMillan-Herod (Managing Director), along with Fort Worth native, Tonya Davis-Holloway (Co-Artistic Director), exists to provide quality transformative Black theater that enlightens the imagination, the spirit, and the soul. The company recently concluded its 11th season with a stunning production of its signature original work, THE FREEDMANS, an homage to Dallas black pioneers, as part of ATTPAC's Elevator Project. Soul Rep is the resident theater company of the South Dallas Cultural Center.

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