Residency: The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies
The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies
by Meg Whiteford
Honey, our protagonist, is on the run from both her past and her present; avoiding questions about love, bodies, language, and the extents of all three. But her friends—the impish Maenads—refuse to just let her escape.The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies is a feminist, queer, maximalist piece—spanning caves, hills, courtrooms, and kitchens—about a woman torn by her desires, unwilling to bend to the needs of men, yet hesitant in the face of her wildness.
Meg Whiteford (Playwright) is an author, essayist, and critic. She is a contributing writer for ArtForum and a the Managing Editor of the Art Book Review. She has shared writing with RedCat Theater, Harlequin Creature, Aperture Magazine, Steve Turner, PAM, Pieter Space, MAMA, The Torrance Art Museum, Coaxial, WCCW, and 356 Mission in LA; Pocket Utopia in NYC; and Living Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark. She is a 2015 Juniper Scholar, a 2015-16 REEF Residency awardee, and winner of the 2016 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize. Her play, The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies, was published in November 2015 by Plays Inverse. A full feature of this work will be produced at The Hive in Brooklyn, NY in February 2017. Her first novel is scheduled to be published in 2017 by &Now Books.
Colleen Hughes (Director)
is a Brooklyn based freelance director. New York credits include: Jelly Bean Junkyard by Sean Pollock (Under St. Marks), workshop of The Plucked Dove by Sam Kahler (The Hive), Year One by Logan Porter (Manhattan Repertory Theatre), Chatroom by Enda Walsh (The Hive), Let Them Eat Cake by Ted Malawer (TinyRhino), Humorless by David Susman (Thespian Productions), Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, adapted by Rob Reese (staged reading, Treehouse Theater), and Germs by Catia Cunha (Grex Group). Other credits include: Origins devised by the Company (JCTC), Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh (A.R.T.’s Oberon), Poke by Bill Doncaster (SHOTZBoston), and Personal Penchants by Barbara Lhota (Open Theatre Project). Her assisting credits include 12th Night by William Shakespeare, directed by Shira Millikowsky (A.R.T. Institute), A Great Wilderness by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Braden Abraham (NPC, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center), and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, directed by Phil Soltanoff (Skidmore College). Training: Skidmore College and the National Theater Institute. Colleen is also the Community Outreach Repre
sentative at Signature Theatre. www.colleenehughes.com
Reviews of The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies:
Praise for The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies:
“Meg Whiteford, a bold new voice, moves us forward by returning us to a theatre that isn’t afraid of dramatic poetry, shapeshifting characters, plots motored by comic metamorphoses, and endings vibrating with tragic loss. She is a 21st century risk-taker, inspired by the daredevil predecessors that startled previous centuries into recognizing the stage as a fluid dream.” – Charles McNulty, chief theatre critic for the Los Angeles Times
“The Shapes We Make With Our Bodies is a guide for a brutally funny flesh-and-blood cartoon that is, in part, about recovery. Yoga, therapy, shrooms, witchcraft, Tarot, sacrifice: Meg Whiteford slants each into off-kilter rituals that, like her rich and wily stage directions, member and dis-member the play’s world, along with our heroine Honey’s sense of self. In this way, the play itself plays Maenad, even as there are Maenads in its pages—tearing through a lurid country of horror film references, broken memories, puns, remixed Herculean labor, and spas—lyric, wild, and murderous.” – Douglas Kearney, author of Patter
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2016 at 5:40 pm. It is filed under Featured, Residencies.
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