Chicago Film and Theater Fest Celebrates Women's Words

LGBT-focused Pride Films and Plays in Chicago is highlighting the L this week, with its Women’s Words Film Festival tonight and the Women’s Words Weekend of plays and readings coming up Friday through Sunday.

Tonight’s program of short films offers nine Chicago premieres, including I Was a Teenage Girl, a story of two teens stretching the boundaries of their friendship;
Social Butterfly, in which a sexy 30-year-old crashes a teen party in the south of France; and Practical Things, involving two girls, first love, Super Glue, and Robert Frost. There will also be screenings of four shorts that were well received at Pride’s Queer Bits Film Festival: Angie and Jackie Final Cut, The Wait, Hypocrites and Strippers, and Another Woman’s Scent. All the films have lesbian characters or themes and are written and/or directed by women.

The program begins at 7:30 p.m. at the Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark St., and will be followed by a conversation with some of the filmmakers. The Public House bar will open at 6:30. Get ticket info here.

Women’s Words Weekend will commence Friday with a staged reading of Patricia Kane’s Pulp, a contemporary lesbian classic, directed by Liz Pazlik, at 7 p.m. at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St.

Saturday and Sunday there will be performances of works by the four finalists in Pride’s Women’s Words contest, all at the Center on Halsted, featuring “women of mystery and women with history; women with tools and women who don’t suffer fools; women who dance and women who take the ‘man’ out of romance,” as Pride’s website puts it. On the schedule are Kali Dances by Pat Montley, directed by Shelley DeHosse, 3 p.m. Saturday; Creative Nonfiction by Laura Jones, directed by Anna Rose li-Epstein, 7 p.m. Saturday; The Girl Who Would Be King by Jan O’Connor, directed by Elyse Dolan, 1 p.m. Sunday; and Jack and the Box Store by Heidi FitzGerald, directed by Lexi Saunders, 4 p.m. Sunday. Get more information and order tickets here.