FOUR SHORT PLAYS BY FOUR WOMEN OF A CERTAIN AGE, Sunday, November 22nd at 8pm on Zoom

JOCUNDA FESTIVAL presents an Encore Zoom Performance of four short plays by four women playwrights: Ellen Pober Rittberg, Janine Robinson, Ellen Orchid and Grace Gibbons on Sunday, November 22 at 8:00 p.m. EST on Zoom. Donations are $15.00. A Q&A with the playwrights, director, actors and audience will follow led by Van Dirk Fisher, the director and founder of the Riant Theatre. 

For tickets to register in advance for this webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_W8JZyALCQAiK7blK8db6Hw

Donation: $15.00 to benefit Riant Theatre.

All of the playwrights are female and in their sixties. With one exception, all of the characters in their plays are female. But that is where the similarities end. Each play has a different theme. Several of the playwrights have seen their works performed on New York City stages over the past several decades; one returned to playwriting after a thirty-year absence, and  one is seeing her fledgling play on its legs for the first time. Professionally, the playwrights are a varied group. They include two professors, a massage therapist, a retired attorney, journalist, psychiatrist, filmmaker, poets, producer and actor—several have more than one day gig.

Ms. Rittberg describes Sabbath Elevator as “a me too play” exploring the issues of empowerment, victimization and what women must contend with when they are with men in confined spaces.  “I’ve never gotten stuck in an elevator, but I thought about what might happen if I placed my female character in a stuck elevator with a man she did not know, and I ran with that concept,” says Ms. Rittberg.  The recently-retired attorney and author of 35 Things Your Teen Won’t Tell You, So I Will is also a journalist who writes and performs her poetry. Her humorous how-to book about caring for a declining parent will be appearing imminently.

Ms. Gibbons describes Cleaning Up When Friends Visit as being “about truth and family secrets and what happens when those secrets come to light.”  Her play germinated as a short story in a creative writing workshop. It then morphed into a play while she attended a Master’s of Fine Arts program at the University of Mississippi several years ago. Explaining why she chose to pursue an MFA program at the time she did, she says, “It’s never too late to find your voice. I feel that way about my whole life.” 

Janine Robinson describes Cheers, A Bar Stool Story, as being about “friendship, betrayal and loyalties.” Two women meet for lunch. One of them has to make a large choice about what she will or won’t tell her friend. She demurs on saying anything more about the plot, or else she’d give away the ending, she says.  A Boston resident, Ms. Robinson has also written and produced a film.

 

Ellen Orchid’s play Therapy is an autobiographical play about seeking justice for a family member when something goes very terribly wrong in a hospital. By day, Orchid is a psychiatrist, but she remains committed to her playwriting. An actor who has gotten roles in televisions dramas, she wrote a one-woman show, Rest In Pieces, A Stand Up Tragedy. Orchid has been writing plays since 1998, she says.

“Audience love the interactive and spirited Q and A that follows the plays,” says Riant Theatre founder and artistic director Van Dirk Fisher. “Having done a score of plays on zoom since Covid-19 struck. I’ve discovered ways to make the performances as close to live theater as pre-Covid times.”

To learn more about the JOCUNDA FESTIVAL visit https://rcl.ink/Sz0   

To submit your play for consideration for the Play Reading Series visit https://rcl.ink/GKw    

To make a DONATION to the JOCUNDA FESTIVAL visit https://rcl.ink/Sc8

 Visit the JOCUNDA GIFT SHOP click here.