2018-2019 Season Keeps Looking for Lilith on the Move!
Local and National Playwrights + Lilith Originals Make Up New Season.
TOURING PRODUCTIONS
Looking for Lilith focuses on touring productions for the first few months of the 2018-2019 season. New to LFL’s touring roster are extended excerpts from the two newest LFL Originals, Defining Infinity and We. Are. Here. Co-Artistic Director and head of Touring, Trina Fischer explains, “by touring these two productions whose themes are so relevant now, LFL has the opportunity to reach more people whose lives are impacted by the issues in these scripts.” Additionally, their powerful bullying and suicide prevention piece, CHOICES, continues to be available for bookings at area middle and high schools and other community organizations. And a revamped excerpt of the perennial favorite What My Hands Have Touched is available for booking into senior centers, libraries, schools and more.
JUST LIKE US
The 2019 Women’s History Month production marks a new venture for Looking for Lilith: a co-production with Teatro Tercera Llamada. The two companies join forces to co-produce Karen Zacarías’ Just Like Us. TTL Producer Haydee Canovas and LFL Co-Artistic Director Kathi E.B. Ellis are “so excited to bring together Louisville’s two women-led social justice theatres.” Just Like Us, based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Helen Thorpe, dramatizes the lives of four Latinas in Denver – two of whom have papers, two of whom do not – as they navigate school and college, friends and romances, all within the shadow of their statuses. Peopled with rich characterizations of real people, this script gives bilingual, Spanish-speaking, and English-speaking performers opportunities for complex, and sometimes controversial, roles that will resonate with many communities in the greater Louisville area. This is the second time LFL has produced a Zacarías script, the first being Legacy of Light, 2016.
NOTE
Rounding out the production season next spring will be the premiere of Louisville-based playwright Eli Keel’s Note. This script was created as part of Derby City Playwrights’ third class of playwrights, and received a public reading during Louisville’s first fringe festival in July 2018. Keel’s script brings out of the shadows individuals who are living with bipolar disorder. And if that individual is also a theatre artist, they write a play about the daily experiences and struggles! This meta-theatrical exploration opens up conversations about mental illness and personalizes the challenges that individuals, their friends, and families encounter on this journey. Set in a rehearsal studio in which performers are rehearsing this play, we also glimpse individuals rehearsing for life. According to LFL Co-Artistic Director Shannon Woolley Allison, “this is a perfect script for LFL’s blend of stylized realism and commitment to taking on tough subjects.”
LFL’s outreach programming maintains its commitment to reaching diverse populations, with seven year-round after-school programs, the partnerships with Eastern Area Community Ministries’ Latina Women’s Group (Grupo de Mujeres) program and Adelante Hispanic Achievers (GirlSpeak), CHOICES (see above), and residencies and workshops throughout the community. Jennifer Thalman Kepler, Co-Artistic Director for outreach, also promises “some big news” about Historias de Fé, LFL’s more than decade-long program with women in Guatemala, for the spring of 2019.
LFL’s 2018-2019 season offerings are rich and complex: the plays focus on lifting up the diverse experiences along the spectrums of gender identity and sexual orientation (Defining Infinity); wrestling with the ‘isms’ that pervade our society (We. Are. Here.); countering bullying (CHOICES); honoring our foremothers and our country (What My Hands Have Touched); revealing the complex heartbreak within immigration stories (Just Like Us); and bringing into the light a mental illness that is frequently stigmatized (Note). Collectively these scripts reflect the company values of lifting up women’s voices, standing with the unheard, and dismantling racism through the arts.
The mission of Looking for Lilith Theatre Company is to create productions and programming by examining history and today's world through women’s perspectives and lifting up unheard voices. LFL productions and programming serve adults, youth and children locally, nationally and internationally.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, provides operating support to Looking for Lilith with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. LFL continues their Racial Justice Initiative with funding from Alternate ROOTS and Louisville Metro External Agency Fund.
For more info about LFL, visit:
www.lookingforlilith.org
Press Contact: Trina Fischer, Co-Artistic Director
(347) 228-6438 | [email protected]
LOOKING FOR LILITH THEATRE COMPANY is a Louisville, KY based not-for-profit, ensemble theatre company, founded in New York City in 2001 by Shannon Woolley Allison and Trina Fischer, both Louisville natives, along with Jennifer Thalman Kepler of Winchester, VA. The mission of this company is to present plays that re-examine history and question today through women’s perspectives, mainly via the collaborative creation of original theatre based on research. All three of the original founders, along with Kathi E.B. Ellis, are the current Co-Artistic Directors of LFL. The company also includes Holly Stone, Jill Marie Schierbaum, Sara G. B. Canary, Ebony Jordan, Karole Spangler, Lindsay Chamberlin, Laura Ellis, and Dawn Schulz Campbell. LFL is on the touring rosters of the Kentucky Arts Council, The Kentucky Center and Alternate ROOTS. They are members of GLI’s Arts and Cultural Alliance, Kentucky Theatre Association, The American Alliance for Theatre and Education, Alternate ROOTS and the Network of Ensemble Theatres. LFL received the 2010 Karen Willis Award from the Kentucky Theatre Association for artistic excellence and commitment to changing Kentucky through theatre. LFL has also been recognized by the International Centre for Women Playwrights with their 50/50 Award for commitment to producing women playwrights. LFL's original devised script, Prevailing Winds, was the recipient of the 2016 Arts-Louisville/Broadway World Awards for Best Full Length Play.
Looking for Lilith Theatre Company presents Defining Infinity, an original devised production, at The Clifton Center. Photo by Holly Stone.
Looking for Lilith Theatre Company presents We. Are. Here., an original devised production, at Bellarmine University's Wyatt Center for the Arts Black Box Theater. Photo by Holly Stone.