Elizabeth Vega, Author at Those Women Productions

Author Archive for Elizabeth Vega

Announcing our 2018 Season and Associate Artists!

Posted on September 24, 2017

THOSE WOMEN PRODUCTIONS ANNOUNCES ARTISTIC LEADERSHIP AND THEME FOR NEW SEASON

Those Women Productions is pleased to announce that Lily Tung Crystal joins our leadership team this season as an Associate Artist. She will partner with Artistic Director Elizabeth Vega, Managing Director Carol Lashof, and returning Associate Artist Norman Patrick Johnson. Our main events for 2018 will be a staged reading of The Melting Pot by Carol Lashof; Shifting Spaces, a trio of one-act plays which shift the way we think about gender roles and identity; and the West Coast Premiere of Woman On Fire by Marisela Treviño Orta.

Those Women Productions was founded in 2014 by Carol Lashof and Elizabeth Vega with a mission to stage hidden truths of gender and power. In 2015, it was named “Best Year-Old Theater Company” by the East Bay Express. From the beginning, Those Women Productions has practiced “Radical Hospitality”: All shows are choose-your-own price; everyone is welcome regardless of ability to pay.

“Crossing Borders” is the theme for our season of new plays planned for 2018. The borders in question are literal and metaphorical, metaphysical and actual; they are of gender, race, nationality, and space-time.

The season begins with a staged reading of The Melting Pot, by Carol S. Lashof. The Melting Pot remixes early 20^th century sources, including Israel Zangwill’s wildly popular melodrama of the same name, to tell a quintessentially American love story – Boy meets Girl, and Nation meets Metaphor. The reading will be directed by Elizabeth Vega and will feature performances by Lily Tung Crystal and Norman Patrick Johnson. It will also feature original music by Berkeley jazz musician and composer Erika Oba. Performances are Saturday, January 20, 4 pm and 8 pm at the Temescal Art Center, 511 48th St, Oakland.

Those Women Productions received a generous grant from the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission this year, which will help support our spring production at the Live Oak Theater in Berkeley: Shifting Spaces is a trio of bold one-act plays featuring characters who fight to claim their full human identities within restrictive social structures.

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 Elizabeth Vega.

S/He (World Premiere)

On the eve of surgery, Sam comes home to pack and to confront his mother about being trans.

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

Revelation (West Coast Premiere)

It’s judgment day, and John, a young man, finds himself buried beside Mary, an old woman, who claims to recognize him. But she’s nothing like any woman he’s ever known.

A darkly comic tour through changing gender roles and social expectations, by Canadian playwright Shirley Barrie, directed by Lily Tung Crystal.

Shifting Spaces opens Friday, March 23, 2018 (press opening), and 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.

Those Women Productions finishes our season with the West Coast Premiere of Woman on Fire, an explosive and relevant play by Bay Area favorite Marisela Treviño Orta, directed by Elizabeth Vega.

Set in 2002 under the specter of the 9/11 terror attacks, Woman on Fire is a re-imagining of Sophocles’ Antigone set along the Arizona/Mexico border. The ghost of a woman who died while crossing the border haunts the unwilling heroine Juanita, the wife of a U.S. border patrolman. Juanita finds herself torn between the law of man and a higher law when she must decide whether to put her husband’s career and their marriage at risk in order to give the restless spirit the proper burial she demands.

Woman on Fire opens in August, 2018, at the Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley.

Those Women Productions practices Radical Hospitality: we welcome everybody to our shows regardless of their ability to pay. We also like to pay our artists, in recognition of their valuable work and because we love them and want them to have food. How do we manage this? With help from our extraordinarily generous community, including many of you who are reading this newsletter right now. In fact, (spoiler alert) we’re about to launch our annual fundraising campaign to make our 2018 season a success. Please consider an early donation. We will sing your praises in the programs of our shows all year long!

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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 Elizabeth Vega

Announcing our 2018 Season and Associate Artists!

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