Mirror Stage's 11th Season of Feed Your Mind Continues with THE PENELOPIAD

Sponsored in part by 4Culture, the 2015-16 season of Mirror Stage's popular Feed Your Mind staged reading series continues with The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, on February 6 & 7, 2016 at the Ethnic Cultural Theatre in Seattle's University District. Directed by Suzanne M. Cohen, Feed Your Mind: The Penelopiad features a multicultural cast of 13 women: Miski Ali, Angie Bolton, Ana Maria Campoy, Christi Cruz, Yadira Duarte, Alyssa Keene, Stephanie Kim-Bryan, Sneha Krishnan, Duygu Erdo?an Monson, Meenakshi Rishi, Meg Savlov, Naho Shioya, and Amber Wolfe.

Shrewd, funny, and insightful, The Penelopiad retells the myth of Odysseus from the point of view of the wandering hero's wife, and the 12 maids he believed were disloyal and had hanged upon his return to Ithaca. Dead for millennia, Penelope and her slain maids tell us their story from the underworld, as women who never stopped learning from experience and, even posthumously, are still doing so.

Performance offers unique ways of knowing that can challenge entrenched paradigms, contribute to pluralism and expand the range of meaningful action. Mirror Stage's innovative Feed Your Mind series of staged readings examines topical issues from different perspectives. Presented without costumes or sets, the emphasis on the text encourages audiences to create their own imagined world inhabited by the play's characters. Following every performance, a moderated discussion with the audience and artists explores the issues raised in more depth. The Penelopiad explores the effects of story-telling perspectives, double standards between the sexes and the classes, and the fairness of justice.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 40 volumes of poetry, children's literature, fiction, and non-fiction, but is best known for her novels, including The Edible Woman, The Handmaid's Tale, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Her latest work is a book of short stories called Stone Mattress: Nine Tales. Her newest novel, MaddAddam, is the final volume in a three-book series that began with Oryx and Crake and continued with The Year of the Flood. The Penelopiad was originally published as a novella in 2005, and a theatrical version was co-produced by the Canadian National Arts Centre and the Royal Shakespeare Company during the summer and fall of 2007. Atwood's most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, a collection of non-fiction essays appeared in 2011. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth was adapted for the screen in 2012. Atwood studied at the University of Toronto and Radcliffe College, becoming a lecturer in English literature. Her work has been published in more than 40 different languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian.

The Ethnic Cultural Theatre is located at 3940 Brooklyn Ave NE in Seattle. Performances will be Saturday at 8:00pm and Sunday at 2:00pm. Admission is $15; $10 for students and seniors. Every performance has 10 Pay-What-You-Can rush tickets ($1 minimum). Free parking is available in University of Washington's lot W12, located at just south of the Ethnic Cultural Theater on Brooklyn Ave NE. For more information, please visit www.mirrorstage.org/penelopiad.

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