ICWP Women Playwrights Podcast

Joanna Pickering reads from her play Beach Break, and then talks with Jenni Munday about her current projects and where to from here after COVID.

Joanna is a British actor and writer, currently living in the USA. She has been described as a multi-talented artist, with a wealth of expertise and experience. She overlaps creative projects in writing, modelling, music and TV/film producing and screenplays.

Joanna can be contacted via these channels.

Website http://www.joannapickering.com/

Twitter: @joannapickering

Instagram: @joannapickering

It was with great sadness we learned that Amy passed away a few weeks after this podcast was published. We have retained it here in her memory.

This Episode is an Interview with Amy Oestreicher

Jenni Munday interviews Amy Oestreicher. She is an Audie award-nominated playwright, performer, and multidisciplinary creator. A singer, librettist, and visual artist, she dedicates her work to celebrating untold stories, and the detours in life that transform communities.

PTSD

A PTSD specialist, artist, author, Huffington Post columnist, international speaker, RAINN representative, and disability advocate, she's given three TEDx Talks on transforming trauma through creativity, and has shared her story on NBC, CBS, ABC, and contributed to 70+ publications on arts and community transformation.

Touring
Amy has toured her musical, Gutless & Grateful, to 200+ venues from 54 Below to Barrington Stage Co since its 2012 NYC debut, and premiered her multimedia musical, Passageways (original lyrics, music, book and artwork) at HERE Arts Center with the release of her memoir, My Beautiful Detour: An Unthinkable Journey from Gutless to Grateful.

Publications
Her plays have been published by Eddy Theatre Co, PerformerStuff, Narcissists Anthology, New World Theatre’s “Solitary Voice: A Collection of Epic Monologues,” finalists in Manhattan Repertory’s Short Play Fest, NYNW Theatre Fest, #MeTooTheatreWomen,"Womenin the Age of Trump," & performed across the country by students for immigration festivals, academic projects.

Founder of "LoveMyDetour," a campaign creating performances designed to entertain, educate, and engage on the intersection of arts and social justice, is part of the National Initiative for Arts and Health in the Military.

The ICWP Centre Stage Podcast was named as one of the Top 20 Playwriting Podcasts on the web by Feedspot.

Ali MacLean

US member Ali MacLean reads excerpts from two of her plays “Sullen Girl” and “This Will Be Our Year”.

She then joins Jenni Munday for a conversation about what motivates her playwrighting, researching dark subject matter, and what inspires ideas for new plays.

Ali can be contacted

Julia Pascal is a playwright and theatre director.

In this interview, she reads from her dramatic full-length stage play AS HAPPY AS GOD IN FRANCE

The characters:

Hannah Arendt at 33
Charlotte Salomon at 25
Eva Daube at 16
Agathe Blumenfeld at 50
Trude Gottlieb at 22

Other roles are taken by the ensemble.

About As Happy As God in France.

The title references the joyful Yiddish invented by Jews in appreciation of their new status as equal citizens in post-Revolutionary France. Its use here is ironic as the play explores French antisemitism In May 1940, German Jewish exiles, seeking refuge in France were ordered to report as 'Undesirables'. Of those 8,000 women were deported to the largest of the many camps near the Spanish border. This drama focuses on the largest of these, Gurs, whose history is hardly known.

This text investigates the false dream of safety in France through the lens of three German Jewish women: thirty-four-year-old, political writer, Hannah Arendt; sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Eva Daube and twenty-four-year-old painter, Charlotte Salomon. They were incarcerated during in the chaotic days between armistice and occupation. The action of this play focuses on a decision of whether to stay, and hope for liberation, or escape in to a dangerous landscape.

As Happy As God in Franceexplores major events of the twentieth century as experienced by these women. Themes include the French betrayal of Revolutionary values, the abandonment of the Jews, sex, love,art, politics, resistance, survival, suicide and escape.It isthe first play about Arendt, Salomon and Daube in Gurs.

The facts

Hannah Arendt was in Gurs in 1940 for eight weeks. Charlotte Salomon is believed to have been incarcerated there before she was murdered in Auschwitz. Eva Daube was in Gurs. Agathe Blumenfeld and Trude Gottlieb are created from research in this hidden history.

The play was completed in 2020 and has had no productions.

When she was married to an Iranian, Eliza's interest in Muslim social and religious practice was acute and her interest has endured into the present.

Eliza reads from a play that combines elements from an earlier play she was commissioned to write about Cliterodectomy.

That play was not allowed to be performed at a university theatre festival in Turkey, because of its subject matter. Later, she incorporated it into another play about some actors rehearsing two short plays against a background of Muslim restrictions that require women actors to wear face coverings. That later play is titled Blue Sky Thinking and is available on Amazon.

This first episode of the Centre Stage podcast celebrates International Women's Day and SWAN Day. Jenni Munday, in Australia, interviews Paddy Gillard-Bentley in Canada, about the writing of Paddy's play " Accidental Fish" (subtitled Coping with Life Badly) and Paddy reads an excerpt from the play.

Reference: Flush Ink Productions (on Facebook)

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