Unexpected Stage Company to Present DC Premiere of Deb Margolin's 8 STOPS

As part of its seventh season, Unexpected Stage Company will present OBIE Award-winning artist Deb Margolin in the Washington area premiere of 8 STOPS. The production will run from July 14 through July 31, 2016, atRandolph Road Theater, 4010 Randolph Road, Wheaton, MD (the former Round House space).

General admission tickets are priced $10 to $27.50, and are on sale via phone at 800-838-3006, online atwww.unexpectedstage.org, and at the door subject to availability. A special Pay-What-You-Can preview performance is scheduled for Thursday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m. For information, please call 301-337-8290 or visit www.unexpectedstage.org.

Playwright, actor, and Yale University associate professor Margolin will perform 8 STOPS, a comedy she wrote concerning the grief of endless compassion. She reunites with director Jay Wahl, artistic director of programming and presentations of Philadelphia's Kimmel Center, where he directed the play's world premiere.

Known to D.C. audiences for the provocative play Imagining Madoff, Margolin's thought-provoking new solo work 8 STOPS is about the inheritability of a kind of compassion that makes the loveliest fools of all it touches, and extends itself to animals, objects, those both animate and inanimate, that cannot speak from themselves. Looking at life and death through the eyes of her son, Margolin's comic investigation reaches many of the saddest registers as she contemplates the suburbs, the spiritual exurbs, illness, desire, and a subway ride with a motherless child who Margolin realizes she has to raise in the time it takes to travel eight stops. This rousing work will leave theater-goers with questions about the nature of compassion and the limits, and the limitlessness, of human endurance.

"Solo performance is to the stage what the close up is to the film; you just go very deep," explains Margolin. "Writing a solo show enables me to speak about things that are very particular to my experiences and the very things in which I am passionate."

8 STOPS was developed in part during the Dael Orlandersmith Writing Residency in the SEI Innovation Studio at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. Merri Milwe and Jay Wahl served as dramaturgs.

Season subscriptions are now available. To purchase, please call 800-838-3006 or visit www.unexpectedstage.org.

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