B3 Productions Announces Season Lineup

B3 recently announced its 2018 line-up. Full of fresh new works and unusual voices, B3 will be celebrating playwrights -- local to international, and contemporary works -- unpublished to infamous.

First up, in March, is A Woman on Stage, written by Ilana Lydia. A madcap comedy, this work calls for the audience to be shepherded around to different small playing areas in the building, in addition to a traditional audience/performer set up. It is strongly feminist and advocates for live theater, with the villain being a Man on TV. According to the playwright, "A Woman on Stage uses radical and unprecedented levels of metatheater to make the audience question the nature of scripted-ness, and reality in general."

In May, B3 will be starting the annual tradition of a Night of Shorts. Playwrights around the world competed for an entry to this evening, which will be judged by the audience every night and a small cash prize will be given to the winning author. Two factors were judged in picking these gems: the writing (of course), and its experimental nature, or the level of provocativeness the work displays.

July brings us local favorite actor and playwright Alex Tuchi's work, Polyphemus. Truth is a power: no one understands that more than the five teenage residents of the mental healing facility that Polyphemus surrounds. Polyphemus is a slow burn about coping with the reality that, in the end, no one knows what normal really is; it tortuously blossoms into moments of true, unbridled honesty that we all give up too soon.

August heats things up with Mac Wellman's Sincerity Forever. Two profane aliens -- literally, furballs -- have landed in the Southern town of Hillsbottom. Is God watching? Does he care? Is God a He? Mac Wellman addresses these and other questions in this Obie Award-winning play that skewers the social malignancy of ignorance, sexism, and racism.

November ushers out the year with Sarah Ruhl's The Vibrator Play (or In the Next Room). A play about sexuality, being intimate, and the balance of power between the sexes, The Vibrator Play is set in the 1880s, when all eyes were on the electric light bulb and its promise for the future that ushered in a new instrument to treat female hysteria. Both comic and wistful, Ruhl is in her element with this off-kilter tale.

Visit B3's website for details and more information. B3 Productions is a resident company at The SIC Sense Theatre, 1902-9 E. McDowell in Phoenix.

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