Carol Lashof, Author at Those Women Productions

Author Archive for Carol Lashof

Those Women Productions Announces the World Premiere of WITCH HUNT

Posted on July 8, 2019

Those Women Productions presents the world premiere of Carol S. Lashof’s Witch Hunt, a new drama that explores the origins of the Salem witch panic and compels us to consider the ties between that infamous era and our present moment in history. Witch Hunt begins preview performances on July 12, opens on Friday, July 19, and runs through August 4 at La Val’s Subterranean Theater in Berkeley. Those Women Productions practices “Radical Hospitality”: the suggested price for tickets is $30 but all tickets for all shows are choose your own price with no minimum. Advance tickets are available at witchhunt.brownpapertickets.com or can be purchased at the door subject to availability.

“I make plays to change the stories we believe in, because it’s the best way I know to change the world we live in,” said playwright Lashof. “When I began research for this project, I was shocked to discover how much of what I thought I knew about the witch trials and Puritan New England turned out to be made up out of a tissue of myth, prejudice, and outright lies. Girls dancing naked in the woods? In February? During one of the coldest winters in New England history? Not likely.”

News

“It’s all connected.”

Posted on August 24, 2018

by Carol Lashof

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“Everything that happens along the border, it’s all connected,” says playwright Marisela Orta about writing Woman on Fire.

In conjunction with the West Coast premiere of Woman on Fire, the playwright talked to theatre critic Lily Janiak of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Q: The initial impulse for “Woman on Fire” came long before recent news broke about children getting separated from their families at our borders. Do you think that adds a different dimension to the play?

A: Everything that happens along the border, it’s all connected. … The border is something that we have to grapple with as a society: how we treat this border versus how we treat, say, the border with Canada, but also the U.S.’ relationship to Latin America and how it’s destabilized those countries. We often forget how we’ve created the crisis that’s created refugees coming north. We need those reminders.

Read the rest of Lily Janiak’s interview here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/performance/article/In-Woman-on-Fire-playwright-Orta-brings-13171974.php

Ciclady Rodriguez as Paola in Woman on Fire

News

SHIFTING SPACES: a trio of bold new plays

Posted on February 5, 2018

by Carol Lashof

THOSE WOMEN PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS SHIFTING SPACES

MARCH 23-APRIL 8, 2018

Coming this spring to the Live Oak Theater in Berkeley, Those Women Productions presents Shifting Spaces, a trio of new one-act plays about individuals fighting to claim their full human identities. The program includes the world premieres of They/Them by Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko and vessels by Kim Yaged, as well as the west coast premiere of Revelation by Shirley Barrie.

These three plays reflect a wide spectrum of feminist perspectives. Each tells a unique story in a bold and captivating voice. Stylistically very different, they all feature characters who fight passionately for and believe courageously in their right to be themselves.

When & Where:

Shifting Spaces will preview on March 23 and open on Saturday, March 24, 2018 (press opening); it plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2 pm through April 8 (no performance on Easter Sunday, April 1) at the Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley.

Tickets:

Those Women Productions is committed to making theater accessible to audiences regardless of ability to pay. All shows are “choose your own price” with prices ranging from $00.00 to $35.00. All seating is General Admission.

Tickets are available in advance through Brown Paper Tickets:

https://shiftingspaces.brownpapertickets.com/

and at the door beginning one-half hour before performances.

The plays of Shifting Spaces are:

vessels (World Premiere)

It’s Germany—1944. Are you a bitch or a whore? Is she your lover, friend, sister, acquaintance, colleague, or occasion for sin?

Commissioned for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, this poetic drama reveals the little-known stories of lesbians in Nazi Germany, written by Kim Yaged, directed by Those Women Productions’ Artistic Director Elizabeth Vega.

Cast

12-17 … Elliot Stanley

25-54 … Jean Cary

AGED … GiGi Anber

They/Them (World Premiere)

On the eve of surgery, Sam comes home to pack and to fight for his mother’s love.

A high-stakes, lyrical encounter between an African-American mother and her transgender son, by Bay Area playwright Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko, directed by Those Women Productions’ Associate Artist Norman Patrick Johnson.

Cast

SAM … Gabby Momah

MOM … Jasmine Williams

CHOCOLATE … Troy Rockett

Understudy for SAM … Jennifer McNeal (playing the role of SAM on March 30)

Revelation (West Coast Premiere)

It’s judgment day, and John finds himself buried next to Mary. She claims to recognize him, but she is nothing like any woman John has ever known.

A darkly comic tour through changing gender roles and social expectations, by Canadian playwright Shirley Barrie, directed by Those Women Productions’ Associate Artist Lily Tung Crystal.

Cast

MARY … Jeannie Barroga

JOHN … Lijesh Krishnan

The Production & Design Team is:

CO-PRODUCERS … Carol Lashof & Elizabeth Vega

STAGE MANAGER … Aurelia Moulin

PROPS DESIGNER … Lindsay Krumbein

COSTUME DESIGNER … Lindsay Krumbein

SCENIC DESIGNER … Celeste Martore

SOUND DESIGNER … Samuel Raskin

LIGHTING DESIGNER … Bert van Aalsburg

Performance schedule:

Friday, March 23: 8 PM (Preview)

Saturday, March 24: 8 PM (Press Opening)

Sunday, March 25: 2 PM

Friday, March 30: 8 PM

Saturday, March 31: 8 PM

Friday, April 6: 8 PM

Saturday, April 7: 8 PM

Sunday, April 8: 2 PM

This production is made possible by the generous support of the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission and Civic Arts Program, the Theatre Bay Area CA$H Grants Program, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the generous donations of many individual supporters. Those Women Productions is a Fractured Atlas sponsored project.

News

The press has a few things to say about Those Women:

Lily Janiak of the SF Chronicle, in a Datebook feature on Witch Hunt: “‘Witch Hunt’ gives Tituba hopes and fears, virtues and flaws. It gives her goals, and it makes her strategic in pursuit of them. In short, it makes Tituba a person.”

“‘Witch Hunt’ is an important and timely production,” writes Jordan Freed in Theatrius.

Carol S. Lashof on the founding of Those Women Productions and the process of writing Witch Hunt, in the magazine 48Hills: “’We were frustrated trying to get our stories made, so rather than rant and rave we started making our own theater.’”

Fritz Mad’Laine writes of Witch Hunt in Theatrius: “The question of how to tell an unrecorded story plagues artists and historians alike. At Salem’s notorious trials, Tituba was the first to confess to practicing witchcraft—but we know little else about her. In Arthur Miller’s classic “The Crucible,” she appears as a victim of the pilgrims’ manipulation, but Lashof portrays her as the master of her own fate.”

“[Carol and I] have the same feeling that we want our audiences to take away. And her job is to convey that feeling on the page, and my job is to stand that feeling up and put it into action.” – Director Elizabeth Vega on collaboration with Lashof for Witch Hunt, in an interview with KPFA.

“You think about how much you think you know…I was mind-blown as to [Tituba’s] story’” – Witch Hunt actor Renee Rogoff on playing Tituba, interviewed on KPOO.

“Most of what’s in popular [on the Salem witch paniic] is a gross distortion of the historical record,” says playwright Carol S. Lashof of her new play Witch Hunt, in an interview on KALW.

Lily Janiak lists UNQUESTIONED INTEGRITY as a Datebook Pick in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Those Women Productions offers a chance to account for how much or how little we’ve progressed since [since the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings] in 1991.”

“Marisela Treviño Orta conjures [a] supernatural border,” writes Carly Van Liere in Theatrius’s review of WOMAN ON FIRE.

Lily Janiak of the San Francisco Chronicle profiles our West Coast premiere of WOMAN ON FIRE and interviews playwright Marisela Treviño Orta: “Everything that happens along the border, it’s all connected.…The border is something that we have to grapple with as a society.”

“‘SHIFTING SPACES’ is so much more than an excellent feminist perspective on self image and determination…Characters transcend the stage, touchingly, as they search for and discover new identities,” writes Owen Brunell in Theatrius.

“Shakespeare would have been proud to see his work take on new life in MARGARET OF ANJOU,” says The Daily Californian.

Lily Janiak of the San Francisco Chronicle profiles Artistic Director Libby Vega: ““There can be a tendency to say, ‘If their stories were interesting, we would know them already.’” But, Vega continues, “just because the story’s not being told doesn’t mean the story’s not there.'”

About MARGARET OF ANJOU, Sam Hurwitt of The Mercury News writes: “the experiment of creating the illusion of a Shakespeare play all about Margaret is a success.”

Berkeleyside features Those Women Productions: “Carol Lashof and Libby Vega aren’t ashamed to reveal their infatuations with the “dead white guys” who populate the Western Canon.”

BEST OF THE EAST BAY: On the occasion of our first birthday in 2015, The East Bay Express named us “Best Year-Old Theater Company.”

Theater critic Sam Hurwitt described our production of IN PLAIN SIGHT as “a provocative mix of voices and perspectives on these classic tales that may inspire the viewer to look back at the originals with new eyes.”

The Dramatist Magazine lauds Those Women for joining the fight for gender parity, “turn[ing] patriarchy on its ear.”

Our production of DISCLOSURE was highlighted in the San Francisco Chronicle’s feature on the “hot SF scene” at PianoFight.

About our inaugural production in 2014, the Daily Californian wrote: “JUST DESERTS is offering something surprisingly new, and drawing a new audience. It is absolutely worth seeing, with or without a grasp of Greek mythology. This play works on multiple levels, and satisfies as diverse an audience as it attracts.”

JUST DESERTS was also an Editor’s Pick of Theatre Bay Area Magazine, where critic Lily Janiak wrote, “Lashof ingeniously channels both what many treasure about Greek mythology–its pitting of evenly matched foes in debates that dig deeper and deeper as combatants seem to be going in circles–while also skewering its misogyny.”

Those Women Productions
A Feminist Community Theater
c/o P.O. Pack #288
1700 Shattuck Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94709

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Author Archive for Carol Lashof

Those Women Productions Announces the World Premiere of WITCH HUNT

“It’s all connected.”

SHIFTING SPACES: a trio of bold new plays

THOSE WOMEN PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS SHIFTING SPACES

MARCH 23-APRIL 8, 2018

When & Where:

Tickets:

https://shiftingspaces.brownpapertickets.com/

The plays of Shifting Spaces are:

vessels (World Premiere)

They/Them (World Premiere)

Revelation (West Coast Premiere)

The Production & Design Team is:

Performance schedule:

In the Press