Fission (World Premiere)

March-April 2005 | Pioneer Square  | Written By Molly Best Tinsley  | Directed by Katjana Vadabanceur

Oregon novelist Molly Best Tinsley explores the life of Lise Meitner — “the Jewish mom of the atomic bomb.” Featuring the talents of Merlin Whitehawk,  Erin Stewart, and Daniel Christensen.

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Notorious Women

May 2005 | Pioneer Square | Written by Zoe Fitzgerald | Directed by Meghan Arnette

Special one-night only public showing of Notorious Women in Live Girls! new theater in Ballard. This year, Live Girls! is rolling out the touring edition of the program which will be heading out to schools and community centers in Autumn 2005. Directed by Meghan Arnette and compiled by Zoe Fitzgerald Notorious Women is Live Girls! Theater’s yearly tribute to famous and infamous women throughout history. Using interviews, speeches, and original theatrical material this production introduces the audience to women who fascinate us and challenge our views of the world. Included are blues icon Billie Holiday, Burmese Freedom Fighter Aung San Suu Kyi, Cuban Ballerina Alicia Alonso, and British Columbia native and painter Emily Carr. Come get a peek at this popular and exciting program!

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Quickies Volume 6

June 2005 | Ballard Underground

Trophies by Dickey Nesenger Director- Zoe Fitzgerald

Fix This by Amy Widdowson Director- Dorothy Lemoult

In The Beginning Again by Lauren D. Yee Director- Ethan Kozaki

Proceed by Dorothy Lemoult Director- Mike Lindgren

Sacajawea by Regan deVictoria Director- Kate Jaeger

The Same Thing by Lisa Solan Director- Brooke Cochran

Quickies, is Live Girls! trademark event and longest running program. Volume 6 features six new plays by women that cover a wide range of cultures and subject matter, from Dickey Nesenger’s dark comedy Trophies, an unraveling of the lives of three trophy wives, to Dorothy Lemoult’s Proceed an absurd tale that spins fear into an urban lovescape and even on to a hilarious retelling of the Sacajawea story from Regan deVictoria that includes a chain smoking, Kokanee swilling heroine. Hosted by the incomparable Kate Jaeger, (of Jet City Improv and the Neutrino Project) Quickies Volume 6 will provide you with exciting new works from all over the United States, exposure to up and coming local writers, and of course, lots of gratuitous entertainment. This will also mark the first run of a mainstage show at Live Girls! new Ballard location. So come on down to Live Girls! and grab a Quickie. Short and Sassy as always, Quickies will leave you begging for more. This year’s directors include: Zoe Fitzgerald, Ethan Kozaki, Mike Lindgren, Kate Jaeger, Brooke Cochran, and Dorothy Lemoult. Quickies 6 will also feature the acting talents of: Gretchen Douma, Kathryn Bartholomew, Zoe Wright, Meghan Arnette, Jonah Martin, Kevin Hyatt, Annette Auger, Douglass Willott, Sarah Ahrens, Raymond L. Williams, Celene Ramadan, and Joy Medeiros.

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Baker’s Dozen – 12 people. 13 days. 1 play.

July 2005 | Ballard Underground | Playwrights: Roxanne Ray, Holly Arsenault, Kristina Key. Directors are Heather Nicholson, Sophi Sagall Hopkins, Zanne Gerrard and Brooke Cochran

Recipe for a Baker’s Dozen Take 1 outline for a play. Chop nicely into 4 equal pieces. Distribute 1 piece to each writer. Let rise. Place on sheet and cook over 4 actors. Allow directors 1 evening each to carefully ice one of the four pieces. Ready in 13 days. NO REALLY! WHAT IS IT ANYWAY? Bakers Dozen was created by Live Girls! as an experiment in disrupting the process of making theater. A Live Girls! company member creates a simple outline of a play in a specific genre with 4 scenes, and descriptions of 4 characters. Each scene is given a to a different writer who has a week to write their scene (they must follow the outline) without seeing the rest of the outline or what the other writers are doing. Each scene is given to a different director who has one night to direct the actors without knowing what happens in the rest of the play. The same group of actors work with a different director every night and then perform the entire play at the end of the week. Hijinks ensue.

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SCAB 

Sept/Oct 2005 | Ballard Underground | Written by Sheila Callaghan | Directed by Meghan Arnette

Live Girls! Theater invites you to the Northwest premiere of SCAB–an intense, sharply witty, wacky yet joyful play by one of America’s most promising and audaciously imaginative playwrights, the award-winning Sheila Callaghan. A fresh, fiery coming of age story, SCAB brings together a post-nuclear family of two very different women, a malevolent statue of the Virgin Mary and a houseplant named Susan to create offbeat, comedic exploration of friendship, love, pain and healing. (Backstage) “written with a yen for interesting language and liberally salted with well-observed details of the lives of newly minted adults…the play shines. (The New York Times) “Sheila Callaghan crafts sparkling dialogue for two goofy graduate students in LA… romantic entanglements are added with wit, and sensitivity. A whip-smart play.” -TimeOut NY (Critic’s Pick) “Rarely does a play give such an impression that the characters were alive long before I began watching them and continued with their lives after I went home… The plot is unusual without being implausible, the dialogue is intelligent while still sounding natural… I would watch this play again without hesitation.” -offoffoff.com

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Playwriting Lab: Workshops and Readings and New Commissions. Oh my!

October 2005  | Ballard Underground

Jumping Cholla by Dorothy Lemoult

The Language of Birds by Dickey Nesenger

An Evening of Body Parts by Kitty Chen

Untold by Jaqueline Hamilton

Girls by Zoe Fitgerald

You Are Pretty by Adrienne Dawes

Live Girls! present their annual series of new work readings. This hand picked crop of up and coming juicy new plays is an all you can eat buffet of exciting new theater. Last years participants moved on to full productions at Live Girls! and NEA/TCG grants. What will you be saying I saw it at Live Girls! first for this year? Get a special full festival pass for $12 and see all six plays for one low price and don’t get left out of anything!

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Creating the Ten-Minute play

October 2005 | Ballard Underground

The workshop will focus on the mechanics of the short play, and what makes it a unique and viable theatrical form that lends itself to more experimentation than the long play format. Through in-class writing assignments, reading of examples of successful ten-minute plays and discussions that highlight aspects of craft such as character as action, stakes, obstacles and onstage visuals, writers will leave the workshop with ideas for writing their own ten-minute plays and where to market their completed projects.

Dickey Nesenger has had numerous productions of her her short plays, such as Ashland’s Short Play Festival (“critic’s pick”), Mae West Festival, Live Girls, and Seattle’s Fringe Festival, New Jersey Repertory (“critic’s pick”), New York’s Looking Glass Theatre, Producer’s Club and Turnip’s Theatre’s Ten Minute New Play Festival (“audience pick”). Her short play The Green Lake Monster was a finalist for the Heideman Award at Louisville’s Humana Festival, and will be published this fall in Knock, a national literary journal.

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Holiday XXX- 4 characters in search of a play

December 2005 | Ballard Underground| Based on Characters Created by Meghan Arnette and Jonah Martin

Giving up Liz by Brooke Rogers

The Gift by Dickey Nesenger

The Meeting by Regan deVictoria

For the fourth year in a row Live Girls! wraps their season in time for the Holidays with three theatrical surprises: Holiday Triple X- Four Characters in Search of a Play. Our gift to you! Three brand new plays commissioned by LG! Featuring the same four characters in the hands of three different writers: Dickey Nesenger, Regan deVictoria, and Brooke Rogers. Holiday Triple X is a theatrical adventure featuring three unknown plays unwrapped for the first time at Live Girls! Every year Live Girls! casts a group of actors, writes character descriptions for them and assigns those descriptions to three writers. The writers are given one month to create a one-act Holiday play using their assigned characters. Live Girls! presents them all in one evening. Hijinks ensue! The characters of 2005 where created by Jonah Martin and Meghan Arnette and have become:The Gift by Dickey Nesenger, Giving Up Liz by Brooke Rogers, and The Meeting by Regan deVictoria. Don’t miss your chance to tear the bows off and shred the wrapping paper with us. Hosted this year by the sassy and strange Live Girls! Trivia Girl Keli Carander. This year’s Holiday Triple X promises to be a wildly entertaining evening of theater. Directed this year by: Joy Brooke Fairfield a regular producer for the Northwest Film Forum, Sophi Sagall Hopkins, a frequent collaborator with Theatre Babylon, and Live Girls! company member Raymond L. Williams. Featuring the acting talents of Dina Maugeri, Erin Palmer, Katie Schempp, and Kait Powers.

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BABES at Live Girls! “The New Threat to Humanity…The Lack Thereof!” Fundraiser for the BABES network

December 2005 | Ballard Underground |

Ensemble production created by the women of BABES Network with assistance from Live Girls! Inspired by Live Girls! Notorious Women Educational Outreach Program, the performance of THE NEW THREAT TO HUMANITY…THE LACK THEREOF! is a culmination of an eight week workshop with Caroline Brown of the Theater for Development program at the University of Winchester in England. In it, the diverse women of BABES will address the theme of humanity, focusing on people vs. numbers and experiences vs. cases. In particular they will look at the specialized needs of women living with HIV/AIDS, stigmas they face and also the current threat to the reauthorization of the Ryan White CARE Act. Theatre for Development (TFD) is a social development practice that uses performance as a tool to help individuals and groups express themselves to the community with the intent of social advocacy. It is recognized internationally as a strong tool for participatory development with sustainable results as it offers a practical and theoretical exploration of the ways in which the arts can be used by communities to create powerful social transformations on their own terms. The application of TFD in the current project between Live Girls! and BABES is one of its kind in the US. Caroline Brown is the facilitator of this TFD workshop and is visiting Seattle on the heels of her recent work with AIDS widows in Kenya. Using Theatre for Development, the women there enlightened their local community about the underlying social causes and repercussions of AIDS in accordance with their own experience. BABES Network, A Program of the YWCA of Seattle – King County – Snohomish County BABES Network-YWCA is a peer led program, a sisterhood of women facing HIV together. Founded on the concept that HIV+ women are uniquely qualified to understand and encourage one another, BABES was started by a diverse group of HIV positive women who came together to share information, experiences, and support. BABES reduces isolation, promotes self-empowerment, enhances quality of life, and serves the needs of women living with HIV by providing peer support, advocacy, education and outreach.