Pride Films and Plays: Women's Work Finalists Perform This Weekend

Promising women playwrights and screenwriters are getting a showcase in Chicago this weekend with performances of lesbian-themed scripts that made the cut as finalists in the Women’s Work contest, sponsored by Pride Films and Plays.

The contest has two categories, Sapphics on Stage and Sapphics on Screen, and judges have selected four stage plays and four film scripts as finalists. All are being performed as staged readings at the Hoover-Leppen Theater of Center on Halsted, Chicago’s LGBT community center.

Tonight at 7:30 there will be a reading of The Basement by Dawn Marie Guernsey, a screenplay about a woman trapped in the basement of a tornado-ravaged building. Sarah Ballema directs. Two performances are scheduled for Saturday, with’70s Shuffle by Diane Edington at 6 p.m.; directed by Hannah Friedman, the 1970s-set film script has a young lesbian bartender-activist assisting an ostensibly straight female FBI agent on a case. At 8 p.m. the stage play Patient HM will be performed. Written by the single-named Vanda and directed by Jacki Jutting, it focuses on a lesbian neuroscientist haunted by the memory of a lost love while treating a man who’s lost the ability to remember.

Three performances are set for Sunday. On the schedule for 1:30 p.m. is Raising Ricci, a stage play by Marilynn Barner Anselmi, about a lesbian couple dealing with the death of their child; Susan Adler directs. Alicia Lomas-Gross’s film script Leap of Faith, about a teacher in a Catholic school who falls in love with the mother of one of her students, will be read at 3:30 p.m. under the direction of Shifra Werch. The series will close with the 6 p.m. performance of Still Fighting It by Cassie Keet, a stage dramedy in which a college student brings her girlfriend home to meet the family. Tara Branham is director.

Readings of the finalists began Wednesday with the screenplay Girls Out Loud by Pat Branch, about a single lesbian who decides to become pregnant and then meets the woman of her dreams, directed by Genevieve Thompson. The stage play Bad Dog by Jennifer Hoppe-House, focusing on a substance abuser getting help from her long-suffering wife and dysfunctional relatives, was Thursday’s performance, directed by Ebony Joy.

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