Town Hall Announces Fourth Installment For New Voices Series

Playwright Madison Wetzell's piece, "The Body Play" will be brought to the stage by Director Lisa Anne Morrison. This lightly produced, two-weekend performance model will be the fourth in Town Hall's New Voices series. New Voices will produce two brand new, never produced-on-stage plays by playwrights living in the nine Bay Area counties. New Voices will heavily feature plays written by traditionally under-represented and under-produced artists.

Something's very wrong with Amy's body. Her detached, neurotic mind, submits this chaotic, screaming body to scrutiny of experts-doctors, therapists, yoga teachers-and ultimately explores what it might mean to be a body, and not just a mind that, regrettably, also has a body. An exploration of a chronic illness and the absurdity of being embodied.

"A common theme in the works we've produced at Town Hall over the last year is psychology/ mental health intersecting with some other aspect of theatrical representation." explains Curator of Artisitc Programming, Daniel J Eslick. "What amazes me about the The Body Play is how Madison Wetzell has created an intersection between feminism, mental health, and physical health and how hilarious, and absurd it all can be. The Body Play centers specifically around the struggle women have to live with to get the healthcare they need, a topic that is all too relevant in this country. The constant struggle of women's bodies vs. a world that doesn't respect them. It is lovely that Madison's piece acts as a bridge between our last few shows and this new season."

"Having a body is really fraught, even under ideal conditions. During the pandemic, as we were all forced to confront the reality of disease, I felt, bizarrely, that the whole world had been brought into a private reckoning I was having with the fragility of my own body." shared playwright Madison Wetzell. "I wrote this play to explore my own maddening journey with what I've been calling the "vague women's diseases," the cluster of invisible, under-researched, hard to diagnose, and therefore largely ignored illnesses that affect mostly people assigned female at birth.

In her essay "On Being Ill," Virginia Woolf writes, "Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed...it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature." If there's something positive I can wrest from the experience of being chronically ill, it's that it brings you face-to-face with your embodied self-who it turns out is a stubborn, exasperating, funny, tender little creature at the heart of who you are."

"I think we all feel a separation between our minds and our bodies at certain times in our lives." shares director Lisa Anne Morrison. "Amy's journey to figure out what is wrong with her body is a story I related to as soon as I read Madison's funny, absurd and very touching play. Amy goes to doctor after doctor and on to a healer, acupuncturist, yoga teacher and so on searching for an answer to why she feels awful all the time. Along the way, with the support of her loving girlfriend, Gianna, she figures out what it is that is keeping her from feeling whole. "The Body Play" speaks to so much of what we go through as humans struggling with what it means to have a "healthy" mind and body that can co-exist as one."

The New Voices series is a first for Town Hall Theatre. The series was created to give a wider-array of playwrights a chance to expose new and in-process works to an audience that may not otherwise be exposed to their stories. Productions in the series will include a facilitated talkback at each performance allowing the playwrights the chance to receive feedback from audiences in a constructive manner, while also giving audiences an insight into the theatre maker's process.

The third season of the New Voices series is in the works, and we are accepting new submissions through Oct 15th 2022.

"The Body Play" will perform on October 7th, 8th, 14th & 15th. Tickets are $25 and the October 15th performance will be Pay-What-You-Can. Tickets and information can be found at TownHallTheatre.com/single-tickets.

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