OPEN READING of selections from The Freeing of Mollie Steimer

by Patrick Keppel to be produced and directed by Keppel and Annie Landenberger to commemorate the RRP’s 10th anniversary in August 2025.

Join us Saturday, Nov 23, 3-6, at the Hall to learn more about this compelling, energized theater piece and how we plan to mount it. There are several interesting roles, small to large, auditions for which will be held in February. Come hear the dialogue and get a taste for the characters to whet your appetite for being part of this very timely world premiere.

Proposed performance: Aug 15-17; 22-24, 2025

In brief: This is a totally relevant story for our times and we’re eager to premier it with the RRP. Audiences will care, and those who saw the 2024 one acts at RRP will recognize that the Triangle one act is an early scene in the play.

As Patrick Keppel writes: “The Freeing of Mollie Steimer is based on the life of a woman who lived in the United States from 1913 to 1923. The Freeing of Mollie Steimer presents episodes in Steimer’s life from her arrival in the US to her deportation to dramatize the psychological difficulty of maintaining ideals—or of expressing or even glimpsing one’s basic humanity—within an utterly corrupt society. Mollie’s goal is to be perfectly free so that she can better help create the perfectly free society aimed at by anarchism, yet to do so she must shed every one of the ties that bind her to the world as it is, no matter how painful, futile, or apparently counter-productive that shedding may be. The play thus not only brings to light the inspirational story of a woman who is as yet relatively obscure, but also provides a historical lens through which we can better perceive current political controversies and divisions without contemporary tribal markers. In part to dramatize this tension, the play’s naturalistic elements are disrupted throughout by various Brechtian elements, music, and shadow-puppetry or on-screen sequences, and a fluid, trickster-tempter-shadow figure (The Bug).”

The play was written in 1997 and received a staged reading at the Boston Playwright’s Theater in May 1999. It has since been seen in parts at various venues, but the RRP production would be its premiere.


CALL FOR ACTS for A VALENTINE’S CABARET
Fri and Sat, Feb 14 & 15, 7PM;
Sunday, Feb 16 at 5PM in the Williamsville Hall.

A collection of songs, solos and sketches, this light-hearted evening has become a RRP favorite.
A call for acts! If you’d like to sing, act, dance, do magic, improvise–whatever for this event, please let me know asap. You’d prepare on your own –if you’d like a director, just whistle–and then the week before opening we’d have one or two rehearsals and a dress rehearsal. I’m happy to say that Dan DeWalt will again be our accompanist for this event.