She does powerpoints! She misunderstands questions!

Currently eating a very late-night dinner post-York Festival of Ideas! Thank you so much to everybody who logged in for Queer Futures in Science Fiction Theatre. This is the first time I’ve gotten to do a public talk on my research; I had such a good time and learned so much from the process! I hope y’all had fun :)

My brain was a bit melty by the time we got to the Q&A (and I also think I just have some auditory processing issues in general anyway?) An anonymous viewer asked a REALLY good question about narrative structure and in the moment the thoughts were just not clicking in my head—I heard ‘Enlightenment’ and my golden retriever brain went on a fetch-quest to queer temporality and HISTORY, which was absolutely not the question!

The folks from YorkFest were kind enough to send me everything from the chat after, so I was able to sit down and read over the actual question again:

Thanks so much for the awesome talk Bee! I enjoyed listening to your work. Could you talk more about the temporality of queer narrative forms? I heard that the hegemonic narrative structure we're used to is very patriarchical (in the sense that there always needs to be a "climax", which slice of life pieces thoughtfully challenge) and stems from European Enlightenment movement as well. What do you think about that?

I’m so into it! This takes me back. When I first started researching my initial PhD proposal (about five minutes before lockdown hit), I spent an afternoon in the British Library utterly agog at Judith Roof’s Come As You Are. She breaks down the idea that narrative structure, particularly that in the west, has basically been patterned after the male perception of sexual intercourse, the ‘climax’ of the story being the big O and release. She was also (delightfully) big mad that even queer stories, particularly lesbian narratives, seemed to follow the same pattern, even though you’d think there’d be some variation since a different perspective is at work!

I couldn’t unsee it. It’s continued to tick over in the back of my head as I write and read. I’ve seen so much writing advice about how this narrative structure--introduction, escalation, climax, resolution—is exciting and keeps the audience hooked, but until then I’d felt weird for questioning it.

(Other variations exist too; screenwriting classes introduced me to ‘introduce, incite, escalate, twist, resolve’, which I find much more helpful, but the same basic thing of the lead-up to the big climax remains consistent.)

Because I just don’t think it’s completely true that we’re actually all that hooked to the format? Like, some people would say to me, “wasn’t it amazing when (climax of the story) happened?” And I’d have to be like “kind of? I got more out of (random detail from Act 1 scene 4). Like, we could have stopped there for a while.” It took me a long time to understand that I might be looking at those stories differently because I look at a LOT of things differently. Queerness involves a different way of reading rooms.

I often find those moments more compelling than many of the ‘big’ parts that I know I’m supposed to care about; I love those odd, queer moments where time is suspended in the middle of the action, where the characters just side-step into like a narrative pocket dimension to do their own thing. I think it was playwright Jeremy O. Harris who drew a connection between anime (comics in general, really) and musicals, because both forms can expand and stretch moments in time so that we can really savor and enjoy them. That’s a form of queer temporality in action.

Online fandom culture has also helped us build that muscle for enjoying those moments; we make gif-sets of micro-expressions, we compile those moments into studies of character and theme. The big climax is fine, but it almost feels like ticking a box (I’m trying to think of a series I’ve been in fandom for where anyone bothered to makes gifs of the big climax. Maybe Trigun Stampede? But does that even count? The reboot is so queer!) It’s like the big dance number before the end of Act One in a musical: the funders expect it and it’s traditional so I guess we gotta. But what if we didn’t worry about ticking that box?

That’s one of the reasons I’ve gotten really enthusiastic about queer video game academia (particularly Bonnie Ruberg, who seems to really be leading the charge there) and what they’re saying about queerness beyond representation. Queer video games had a similar revelation to the ‘slice of life’ form with walking simulators in the mid-2010s. A walking simulator was a shift in perspective— you could design an experience based on what a bird might see in an afternoon flight or a queer person walking through a fairy tale wood or a woman walking alone at night—and the player could just spend time there, savoring those odds moments, because they weren’t being pushed to chase any particular climax to make the story ‘worthwhile’.

All this to say: I totally get what pattern you’re talking about, I’m super into exploring how to subvert this through queer time, and I think with the intersection and audience experience of other formats (TV and film where you can pause and zoom in, walking simulator games where you can take time to explore) we’re gaining more permission in the theatre world to mess about with queer time. And how exciting is that?

Thanks again for joining me for the talk! And if you weren’t able to join tonight, the link to the recording will be up soon :)

Getting Interactive!

I’m getting into edits right now for my next project, an interactive travelogue about a hitchhiker in space leaving messages for the girlfriend she thinks is following right behind her. It’s weird reading back on drafts from March where I wrote notes about how the interaction and choice mechanic might work. I speculated about apps, projections, a spooky voice over. All of those right now are being boiled down into a character played by a person onstage because that seems like the most sensible way to find out if the story and choices work with an audience (why pilot a whole tech system before piloting the story?) But they can be scaled up again—to the app, the projections, the spooky voiceover—basically anytime. The core thing of information being delivered and choices being made doesn’t actually change.

It’s weird realizing that I’ve learned to think about interactive theatre like this just over the last few months. I had some experience writing games for fun, which led to opportunities to edit and consult on scripts for choice-based games and audio dramas as my editing work picked up over lockdown. Going into the PhD, I knew the department here at University of York was strong on tech and interactive media, but I didn’t expect to get to jump into it immediately.

We’re looking at the final results now of what I’ve been mentally referring to as ‘Schrodinger’s videogame”, a project that exists in many forms but isn’t quite done. Over March, we essentially staged and filmed a ten-minute musical designed for VR, shot on green screen and recorded for spatialized audio. The project sent me hunting across campus for headsets to borrow so I could play/research and learn things like how long onboarding usually takes or how dizzy someone can get if they turn their head too fast in a game.

Just a few days after the final recording day for the musical game, I flew out to Poland as one of University of York’s team members for EU Creative Europe Play-On project’s Digital Campus. For this three-day event, theatre makers and programming/tech folks from all over Europe and beyond gathered at the Ludowy Theatre in Krakow. We were there to make interactive projects designed to both explore the tech capabilities of the theatre’s newest building and encourage local students to get involved in the space. After three days, all the groups gathered with the artistic directors and leaders of the theatres who have been working with Play On these past three years to share what we had made: robots who gave guided tours of hidden nooks and crannies in the building, projections and animations triggered by motion sensors, sculptures that reacted to sound.

In between all these projects, I’ve been cramming in as many workshops as I can: how to use Unity, getting to grips with AR, different approaches to spatialized audio. Despite being insanely busy, everyone I’ve gotten to work with has been so patient and generous about letting me pick their brains. It’s also led to some happy reunions: just when I realized I needed help getting back on track with the space hitchhiker play, the stars aligned and brought Leo Doulton into town, with a few spare hours to catch up and share some wisdom from his own projects (seriously, go check out Come Bargain with Uncanny Things.)

As I work on the space hitchhiker play—called If You Find This, and getting on its feet in front of an audience for the first time this July!—I’m also in the early stages of another project with Four Wheel Drive Theatre, exploring how we can create an interactive show in York’s Guildhall using their built-in button-voting system (might not have been the original intended purpose, but they’re way ahead of the game for staging interactive work!)

Things will go on pause slightly as I get myself sorted out for York Festival of Ideas next month. My presentation covers about 100 years of sci-fi theatre (loosely, since it’s only 40 minutes long!) but looking ahead at what’s happening now in the genre, interactive theatre—and all the different things that can mean at this point—is playing a big part.

Happy US premiere of The Squirrel Plays weekend!

(I’m trying to catch up on writing and tracking things since I remembered that I have a website where I’m supposed to be writing about and tracking things I’ve been doing and I haven’t touched it in a slightly yikes number of months.)

First, though, this weekend is the opening of the US premiere of Mia McCullough’s The Squirrel Plays!

I’m so excited for Mia and for everyone who’s going to get to see her work, but it’s a little bittersweet. When we took the show to Edinburgh in 2018, many good things were in progress for reproductive health care across the world: Ireland had just had its landslide referendum result, and then Argentina’s congress voted on a new bill that would pave the way to legalising abortion there too.

As a cast of mostly North American immigrants with a variety of visa situations between us, we kept glancing back across the pond nervously. We knew something was going to happen with reproductive rights, but we weren’t sure exactly what or when. It sometimes made talking about the show challenging; we knew in our guts that it was important, but it was hard to explain that in a soundbite-sized chunk while handing out flyers.

When Mia flew out to see us, we spent a good hour talking it all through. She theorized that when it happened, Roe v Wade wouldn’t take a direct hit but instead get undermined by a bunch of lesser, tetchy bills. Death by a thousand cuts. It would be harder to track, and as a result, it would be harder to raise awareness around it. It… did not happen like that. (And it was a year ago. A year ago! What???)

I wonder what watching this show will be like in a post-Dobbs environment. The Seattle production will also feature all three plays in the sequence, covering even more topics than we were able to in our runtime in Edinburgh: racism, gun control, gerrymandering, district lines and social media justice.

And you can check out more about Mia McCullough’s work and what she’s doing next here ❤️

Happy podcast day, here's some notes!

I got Elvira’s email about being part of her podcast for Mountview’s Asexuality Visibility Day on the train back to York after the holidays. It was really nice to get to talk about theatre with another queer creator, and to get to revisit Mission Creep. The episode also features producer Lotty Holder, and I loved what she had to say about how exploring a greater variety of queer experiences in our storytelling works to EVERYONE’S benefit! Check out the full podcast here.

We touched on a ton of different things throughout the conversation, and I wanted to throw some links out for anyone who wanted to look into any of these things further:

We talked a little bit about what it’s like living as an ace/aro person in a society with very heteronormative ideas of what personal fulfillment is. Angela Chen’s book Ace is a great deep dive into what this is like, and why our perspective is valuable to a society trying to get healthier about how we self-actualize: Ace - ANGELA CHEN

I brought up reproductive futurism and how it impacts the way we imagine the future. Rebekah Sheldon explains this in much more detail in The Child to Come using examples from sci-fi media (and real-life ad campaigns, for that matter) and discusses how this frame of mind influences our approach to addressing climate change: The Child to Come — University of Minnesota Press (umn.edu)

Figuring out a new relationship with time, growth, and the way we imagine the future has been a part of queer storytelling for a long time. Sara Jaffe does a great job contextualizing the idea of ‘queer time’ in this article: Queer Time: The Alternative to “Adulting” - JSTOR Daily

(Sara Jaffe is different from Sarah Jaffe, whose labor reporting is also relevant to how we imagine the future and hugely influential to me. I am also deeply relieved that they are different people, because my god who has that many hours in the day???)

I got a bit tongue-tied at the mere IDEA of the sheer number of AMAZING things we can and should be doing to make theatre easier to access. (I think I also said it’s ‘become’ harder to access, which is true, but implies that it was…easy in the first place? It wasn’t.)

I’ve bitched before, but I was so excited by what some of the theatres started to do to make theatre more accessible during lockdown, and so disappointed by the lack of follow-thru.

I like livestreams, and I like archive footage, and I’m okay with the NT cinema experiences though sometimes it feels like they cut the audience’s laughter off if they think it went on for too long? Deeply unfair.

The further I go along with stuff, the more I realize that musical theatre as a business and production model baffles me. But cast recordings sustained me and my MT friends when we couldn’t go see the shows we loved.

Really what I want is hybrid models of production. I want livestreams of shows so the actors can share their energy with an in-person audience, but people can still participate remotely. I want archival footage and I want audio recordings of performances. I want separately recorded radio drama versions of plays. I want interactive games available online where you can start getting immersed in the world of the play before you go to see the show, or even if you never get to see the show at all.

I want stuff you can use and enjoy from far far away so that you can experience some of the show even if you can’t be there in person. I’d love audiences to have multiple ways of accessing a production.

I’ve been following the development of platforms like LIVR, which offers a catalog of past fringe theatre shows recorded specially to be viewed both in VR or just on your phone: LIVR

One of the many things that made me want to do further research at the University of York is the TFTI department’s ongoing research into interactive and immersive storytelling techniques. When I talk about more VR theatre and other kinds of theatre experiences in the future, this is the kind of stuff I’m talking about.

More soon,

Bee

Just a quick update (the remix!)

Once again, I’ve been putting off doing a post for ages. So I’m gonna go with the green option and recycle!

-I went back to the US this summer for family-time.

-And now I am back in the UK getting settled into a new flat!

-This summer I continued doing lots of research and and writing and work on projects that aren’t anywhere near being ready for posts or junk, which feels really good.

-I also spent some extra time building up my other work! To learn more about what I can do for you as a proofreader, check out my new page!

More soon,

Bee

Just a quick update

I’ve been putting off doing a post for ages, but:

-I am doing okay.

-I am still in London.

-I have been doing lots of research and and writing and work on projects that aren’t anywhere near being ready for posts or junk, which feels really good.

-I have also been doing lots of not-research and not-writing and not-work, which also feels really good.

-I found my old choose-your-own-adventure game from a couple years ago! I’d forgotten about this. ‘YOU FORGOT YOUR MUG OF TEA’ was my learning-how-to-use-Twine project in like 2017, and I enjoyed making it so much. I’ve been doing a little more research on game structure and interactive media, and I want to do more things like this. Especially after almost a full year in social distancing, it’s fun to go back to this game I wrote based on my experience moving into my flat when it was all still new to me. I’m still disappointed in the lack of ghosts here, but I’m still in love with the bathtub. You can play it here.

Happy Blade Runner Month, the Future is Now

This last week has been largely occupied by finalising the shortlist for Talos’ scratch night of Hopepunk theatre (also WOW did we get some great submissions for our scratch night!) I found a little time to update the page for Mission Creep with some of the amazingly positive responses we got in October. I’ve got a lot to think about as I tinker with the script in preparation for when we do it all again on December 8th…

But in the meantime, November has filled up with new activities:

I learned about this in drips and drops over the last year throughout meetings with Cyborphic: Andriana was reconstructing a lost Greek drama, Christos was trying out some new dialogue, had I ever thought about playing a horse…? Now there’s a team and a performance date, and a powerhouse of a script—my god, Melanippe is a woman with no fucks to give. I’m so excited to give voice to her as she head-butts her way through the bullshit. This might be booked up already? Click the button to check.

I speak on panels now? I’ve never done this, and I’m trying to squash in all my homework now to prepare. Adam Smith is hosting a squad of queer writers to talk sci-fi, and we’re gonna tear it up. I got to meet several of the panel members briefly when they came to see Mission Creep and I’m working my way now through a fantastic little reading list of their stories. Click the button to get booking!

I was already so proud to know some of the people behind this initiative and now they’ve asked me to be in it! Ceiling Project is championing women creating new musical theatre—this first program is a collection of 5 short musicals in one performance. I started learning the music for it last week and it’s just such gorgeous music. As always, the button leads you to ticket sales—-GO BUY.

Mission Creep at the White Bear Theatre

Just a few weeks ago I was reunited with Luke and Pip of Unmasked Theatre. After hosting Mission Creep in their scratch night last October, we’d gotten back in touch to discuss the next steps for the play. They were generous enough to bring me down to Brighton for a few days R&D. It was fun to have artists already familiar with the story react to and embrace the changes, giving feedback on how to take the new elements even further.

At the beginning of 2018, Mission Creep was a 15 minute thing inspired loosely by a bomb scare in Hawaii and some questions I had about how we perform our relationships in public. It came with aliens, and some jokes about what social media might be used for during the apocalypse.

Now Mission Creep is over an hour long. It’s about control and consent, the power and danger of saying ‘yes’. It has even more questions about how we perform our relationships for an audience, and how we take care of each other in a crisis. The aliens are still there, but half my old apocalypse jokes became reality so I had to come up with new ones.

It’s got a fantastic new director—Paul Anthoney of Controlled Chaos UK—who’s been patiently but persistently checking in since the beginning of 2019. His feedback has been invaluable in shaping the development of the script. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does for our production in October.

We’ll be on for a week at The White Bear, not too long from now! And I’m excited to get into rehearsals and see what work we do :)

(And if you’re ever in need of graphic design, go throw all your money at Kelly Long. She’s a woman of endless talents!)

More soon~

Bee

TALOS 2019

Last year I got to meet the Cyborphic team and perform in the second Talos Festival, where a bunch of awesome nerdy theatre folks come together and create some new sci-fi stories for the stage. 

Now as an associate artist at Cyborphic, we’re stoked to announce that we’ll be taking over the Omnibus Theatre for A WHOLE WEEK this December for a third round of Talos!

It’s a little bit different this time around; there’s still going to be opportunities for playwrights to have all-new scripts put on their feet. But we’re opening up submissions for production proposals, and reaching out to companies who have a show ready (or soon-to-be-ready!) to be seen. So if you’ve got a show and want to have it featured in the festival, check out the link below:

Talos III: Science Fiction Theatre Festival of London is back for its third festival on 2-9 December 2019 at the Omnibus Theatre in London. We are currently seeking  proposals from theatre companies and groups to bring their sci-fi theatre shows to the festival. We're excited to hear from all artists but want to particularly encourage BAME and LGBTQ+ individuals and groups to propose their own SF visions.

Deadline: 31st August 2019 (midnight, UK time). See here for more information on how to apply: https://www.cyborphic.com/talos-2019

February Round-Up!

Lots of voice work this month, with a recording to share!

-Booked a rather physical voice over job with Kode Media! Once we finished the main copy I got to jump up and dub in some action-sounds (Pressing benches! Flipping tires! Running a marathon through the woods…at 4am??? The joy of acting, you get to pretend to do things you would never, ever do…)

-Sang some new music at Crazy Coqs with Tim Shaw! I’m very lucky to have Tim as a friend; he’s a fantastic MD and composer, and every once in a while he sends me one of his new songs to try. This time he and John Myatt put together a spec for a full musical, and a few of us came in to try it in front of an audience! Speaking of:

-Throwback to when we recorded this…last year? Tim was on and off tour, and I was between flights to Dublin for filming, when he messaged and was like, “Can we record this TOMORROW?” I take pride in being a quick study though not quite a sight-reader, so we had a silly, speedy recording session the next day. I’ll add the full version to the Voice page soon, but here’s a preview:

Happy New Year!

Just coming off the holidays and getting back into business! Here’s a round-up of new things on the site:

-Separate pages for Acting and Voice work!

-Voice page now has CONCERT DEMO, live sound clips from Theatretripp Productions’ concert last year!

-Updated Press section with Nice Things about The Squirrel Plays at Edinburgh Fringe!

-Updated Writing page with More Nice Things about Mission Creep performances last year (and new, lovely endorsements off everyone’s favourite playwrighting site, New Play Exchange!)

Also (and this has nothing to do with anything, I just think it’s neat) one of the spacey-sites I follow just reposted these photos of Space. Like I said, nothing to do with anything! They’re just REALLY neat.

Hope you’re having a good 2019 so far!

Mission Creep at Brighton Scratch Night: Updated!

BRIGHTON: what happened, and what’s happening NEXT.

DECEMBER 13TH 2018 EDIT: A lot has happened since this post was originally published! After further discussion, there is no longer a production of Mission Creep going forward to Brighton Fringe 2019. But the scratch night was still a great experience, and I don’t want to delete a whole post about something happy!

I meant to have this post out last week, but then got smacked with the weirdest cold/laryngitis/thing. Stay indoors, it’s dangerous out there…

I took the train to Brighton for the final night of the Brighton Scratch Night on October 25th knowing that Mission Creep had won the audience vote for the event's first evening of new plays on the 23rd. Lots of people I’d met never or once had tagged me in some nice tweets and said nice things. So going in, I was reasonably confident that we’d all have a good time.

By the end of the night, the Mission Creep team and I were standing with multiple prosecco bottle-trophies in a room flooded with praise and questions about what we were going to do next.

Christine Kempell—the latest and quite possibly maddest incarnation of Mary—won audience vote for Best Performance.

Mission Creep won audience pick for Tuesday AND Thursday night’s performances, and so won the audience vote for the event overall.

And then Sussex Playwrights and Fringe Review wrote really nice things about us!

It was great. That’s an understatement.

All in all, Unmasked Theatre’s scratch event was really flipping cool. Other reviewers have said it better, but it’s exciting to see shared themes come out in a new writing event. You learn what everyone is worried about, and how they’re processing it. Turns out everyone at Brighton Scratch Night is worried about authority, and we’re processing it by resetting ourselves in the most bizarre narratives possible—alternate universes where immigration challenges are flipped, Pinter-esque housing nightmares…and then Mission Creep, where aliens arrive and everybody says great, let’s get the fuck off this planet.

And special thanks to Pip O’Neill of Unmasked Theatre—-Bossy ladies get shit done!

Voice Over Demo Reels!

This has been a work in progress since roughly…December 2017?

But after some fantastic classes at The Showreel (with much wonderful guidance from JP Orr in particular!), a few interruptions (skiving off to do stuff like EdFringe and a bunch of other sci-fi and new writing scratchy things), and tons of support from my US/UK actor community here in London, I finally have….

DEMO. REELS.

For commercial and corporate/narrative work. With my accent. And all the weird things I can DO with my accent, which it turns out is way more than I thought.

The reels are up on the Gallery page, and I have a new profile up on Voice123.

Currently looking for representation, so if you know anybody who’s like, “I need an American chick who can sound fourteen AND thirty-four AND explain that weird “yeah-no-yeah” contranym-thing they do in California?”

HIT. ME. UP.

Cyborphic

While enjoying the after-show buzz at Controlled Chaos’ Chaos Nights II, I got talking with several folks about what’s next, which reminded me that I never actually wrote anything about the fact that I’m now an Artistic Associate at Cyborphic!

Look, I’m on the website!

Cyborphic is some cool folks who are into classical theatre AND sci-fi theatre AND the intersection of both. We’re creating new theatre, and raising awareness about the stuff that’s already out there. Sci-fi theatre honestly isn’t THAT niche, you’ve seen more than you think! Folks are just shy about talking it up because they think they’re going to get sidelined as being too genre, or too geek, or too whatever. We’re not worried about that; we just like sci-fi and we want to see more of it onstage. Having run two successful festivals and several more workshops, Cyborphic is getting ready to expand.

All this to say: if you’ve written something sci-fi, or if you want to be in something sci-fi, or if you’re just generally INTERESTED in sci-fi theatre: hit me up! Along with my work with Cyborphic, I’m just happy to meet like-minded folks and learn more about what people are making :)

Mission Creep at Controlled Chaos' CHAOS NIGHTS VOL. II

So this is happening on TUESDAY.

While at Edinburgh Fringe with The Squirrel Plays, I got an email from the folks at Controlled Chaos saying Mission Creep had been shortlisted for another event earlier in the year, and could they include it in their new writing night on September 11th?

AWESOME.  I rounded up some actor-friends who were at the festival for their own productions (and wrangled Hugh Stubbins, who was also in The Squirrel Plays and DIDN'T HAVE A CHOICE) to do a refresher read so I could make edits. The entire cast and crew of The Squirrel Plays was kind enough to sit in for the reading and offer feedback. A few days later, the Controlled Chaos folks came back and asked if I had any recommendations for casting?

AWESOME. My actor-friends had all, predictably, nailed it at the reading because they're great. And when I asked if they'd like to do the thing for real, they all said yes!

AWESOME!

The turn-around time on this process is FAST, and I am incredibly lucky to have Luis Gallo Mudarra on as director. The depth of work he's achieved in like two days is so crazy good. I got to watch a run-through yesterday, and could not be happier with how it's going. Luis is a writer's dream, and these nerds are smashing it.

CHAOS NIGHTS VOL. II is happening on September 11th at Katzspace near London Bridge. Get your tix here!

Directed by Luis Gallo Mudarra

TESS---Emilia Stawicki

LIAM---Hugh Stubbins

MARY---Michal Horowicz

Pictured at top, left to right: Hugh Stubbins, Emilia Stawicki, Michal Horowicz

The Squirrel Plays #EdFringe2018 Round-Up!

I got home from Edinburgh Festival Fringe a week ago TODAY. Bizarre. I'm still having weird fringe-dreams about going to concerts at the Pianodrome only to realize that the Pianodrome has been relocated from Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens to a boat that's ALSO made of pianos. We're sailing to Alaska and Lady Rizo has been made captain. Fine. 

Since we all crashed back in London, we've had EVEN MORE good press for the show. It's exciting to see the momentum continue, especially as election season looms and these issues continue to press on the brain...we met lots of Americans abroad this year who are thinking, and worried. We have work to do before November!

"The cast are all superb...It’s a smart take on an emotive subject which is as timely now as ever, particularly given recent events in the US and Ireland (and even more recently in Argentina). It’s a show that deserves to be seen by a large audience and will likely provoke wider conversations..." ★★★★ Cath Renton, The Wee Review

"The Squirrel Plays is a sensitive and timely analysis of the issues surrounding female reproductive health and bodily autonomy." ★★★★ Grace Lavender, The Skinny

"All performers achieved an excellent balance between the play’s moments of comedy and more serious undertones....The Squirrel Plays is a vital production for those in search of feminist theatre at the festival. Part of the Main have created a sharp and polished performance that captures a wide spectrum of opinions on abortion without lecturing the audience. It’s complex yet comprehensible." ★★★★ Carla Van Der Sluijs, Broadway Baby

"What is normally an unavoidably hard hitting, sober subject is elevated in The Squirrel Plays by a refusal to allow the theme to suppress other shades of emotion – tenderness, humour, even boredom, all find their place in the play. The characters themselves are slight stereotypes; [Alice], the soft mother, [Linda], the local resident’s association tyrant. It’s a testament to the skill of the cast that they don’t allow themselves to be consumed by these types, but rather make space for their characters to experience inner conflict...This is a striking, loveable production, skilfully directed. It jumps with ease the hurdle at which many Fringe productions fall: to handle a major contemporary issue with exploratory thoughtfulness." ★★★★ Maya Little, Cherwell

We're so pleased with the response we got at the festival, both from the press and from audience members who stayed to discuss the show with us. Keep an eye on Part of the Main! This was only their first big production at the Fringe and they absolutely smashed it.

Now that I'm back in London I've got a couple more projects coming up, more on those soon!

Recommendation for Mission Creep!

So this is completely unrelated to Edinburgh Fringe, but it was a really nice thing that popped up this last week. Fellow New Play Exchange playwright Steve Martin wrote this awesome endorsement for my short play Mission Creep! 

Mission Creep has a new draft as of July, and has been submitted to some more new writing opportunities since then. But the script is available to read on New Play Exchange. Or if you're not on NPX and just want to know more about it, send me a message!

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: First Week

Yes, that's me and director Jessica Bickel-Barlow onstage talking to Amanda Palmer and Andrew O'Neill about The Squirrel Plays. The Fringe is nuts.

Our first week at Edinburgh Fringe has been all about learning how to DO the Fringe. It's the first time out for most of us, so we're all scrambling together to learn how to dance in a squirrel costume on the Royal Mile, how to buy a round of drinks before the queue to the next show suddenly migrates, how to teleport from South Bridge to Summerhall.

And how to jump in when one of your musical heroes asks for show recommendations on Twitter, and then invites you to DO something with her onstage that night at her secret gig.

Our performances at C Cubed are going well so far, with house sizes growing every night. And we're each running around trying to catch as much theatre as we can---empowering feminist disco (Glittery Clittery!) , murderous why-dunnits (Ladykiller!), and late-night sexy-escapade gig theatre (One Life Stand!) 

My calves are turning into rocks and everyone here is friend-shaped. More to come!

Praise for The Squirrel Plays!

The Squirrel Plays has just finished previews at Theatre 503! Here's what folks had to say about our show:

"...an exercise in intimacy and style, while also producing a strong commentary for the female role in theatre and in the world...this was  a delight to watch." Stagey Lady 

"Not only is Jessica Bickel-Barlow’s directing style fresh and intelligent, it is inspiring" ★★★★ London Pub Theatres

"An example of excellent fringe theatre. The play, production and performance of this piece are all very strong...a contemporary British audience could view The Squirrel Plays as a warning for the continued privatisation of the NHS." Matthew Cleverly

"We’ve done a lot of talking about America this year, and under the direction of American Jessica Bickel-Barlow, Mia McCullough’s play adds a spark of sardonic fire to the fray...The Squirrel Plays makes clear that our care and responsibility for the little critters, as well as each other, is an issue that has never been more pertinent." ★★★★ Theatre Weekly

"You can't help but smile at this little bit of smart theatre...Worth searching out if you are paying this wonderful festival a visit." Close-Up Culture

We start our run at EdFringe in TEN DAYS. If you haven't already, check out our Indiegogo page to learn more about the show, and send some money our way if you believe in Part of the Main---a theatre company devoted to bringing stories written by and about women to stages across the UK: The Squirrel Plays at the Edinburgh Fringe

Tiny Shorts at The Union Theatre!

So the previews of The Squirrel Plays at Theatre503 are still very much a thing that you should see (and if you can't come see us, might I recommend other ways to contribute to our success?)

But right BEFORE that, you should come see Tiny Shorts at The Union Theatre!

Eagle and Beaver Ensemble is a new theatre company bringing North American plays to London (and giving North American actors like me a chance to play with some new writing!)

We're on July 1st (Canada Day!) at 7:30pm, and we just might be adding a second performance date (TBC!) Early-bird benefits very much available on ticket sales, or you can chance it and try to get tickets at the door for £15.