Unexpected Stage Company's 8 STOPS to Benefit Red Wiggler Community Farm

Unexpected Stage Company's Friday, July 29 performance (7:30p) of 8 STOPS will benefit Red Wiggler Community Farm, with half of all ticket sales for that evening going to support this local non-profit.

Red Wiggler Community Farm is a 12-acre organic farm where people with and without developmental disabilities come together to work, learn, and grow healthy food. Red Wiggler was founded in 1996 in response to the need for healthy food and meaningful employment for adults with developmental disabilities. Now entering its third decade, it has grown to support cross-functional programming that employs, educates, and feeds more than 1500 youth and adults throughout Montgomery County, Maryland.

OBIE Award-winning artist Deb Margolin performs her new solo work 8 STOPS in its Washington-area premiere at Randolph Road Theater July 14 through July 31. For more information, please see the release below or visit www.unexpectedstage.org. General admission tickets are priced $10 to $27.50, and are on sale via phone at 800-838-3006, online, and at the door subject to availability.

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.

Celebrating its seventh season in 2016, Unexpected Stage Company is a professional regional theater company founded by the husband-and-wife team of Christopher Goodrich and Rachel Stroud-Goodrich. The company dedicates itself to honoring the intricacies and intimacies of the complete human experience and, to that end, seeks to unite people, place and storytelling in order to explore interconnection. Visit www.unexpectedstage.org and www.facebook.com/unexpectedstage.

DEB MARGOLIN is a playwright, performance artist, actor and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company. She is the author of ten full-length solo performance pieces, as well as numerous plays, and is the recipient of a 1999-2000 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. Deb was awarded the Richard H. Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence at Yale University, and the Kesselring Playwriting Prize for her play Three Seconds in the Key, as well as the 2008 Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright Award. Caryl Churchill's play Seven Jewish Children inspired Deb's piece Seven Palestinian Children. Both pieces, exploring the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, have been presented together internationally. She has lectured extensively at universities throughout the country and has been an artist-in-residence at New York University, Hampshire College, and University of Hawaii, and a Zale Kimmerling writer-in-residence at Tulane University. Deb's play Imagining Madoff premiered at Stageworks Hudson in Hudson, N.Y., and at Theater J in Washington, D.C., and was nominated for the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play. A compilation of her performance pieces and plays entitled Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO was published in 1999 by Cassell/Continuum Press. Deb is currently an Associate Professor in Yale University's undergraduate Theater Studies Program, and a proud alum of New Dramatists. She lives in New Jersey, which she denies.

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