BABES WITH BLADES THEATRE COMPANY ANNOUNCES 2023 SEASON:
SHARPENING THE CUTTING EDGE
Featuring an Extended Run of Their New Works Festival, Fighting Words, And A Queer Approach To A Jacobean Problem Child, This Season Carves Out More Space For Marginalized Voices In Theater.
CHICAGO – Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s (BWBTC) announces its 2023 season. Now in its 26th year, the Babes With Blades latest season includes an extended run of its new works festival, the Fighting Words Festival, June 17 – 25 at The Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa, and The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster and directed by Artistic Director Hayley Rice from September 8 – October 21 at The Factory Theater, 1623 W. Howard St.
“Babes With Blades Theatre Company has expanded our free, new works festival to allow for more of our audience to contribute to developing the new stories we are telling,” states Artistic Director Hayley Rice (she/her/hers). “New works are essential to our company and audience feedback is critical to any new script’s development. For this round of Fighting Words, BWBTC is presenting three incredible scripts that run the gamut of representation for marginalized voices such as cultural, gender and socio-economic status and their intersectionalities. We are also taking a queer look at Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. While that script might seem like an unusual or even antiquated selection for BWBTC, telling a story about a femme identified person overcoming toxic masculinity captures why BWBTC was founded more than 20 years ago.”
Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s 26th Season features:
FIGHTING WORDS FESTIVAL
June 17 – 25, 2023
Saturdays at 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m.
The Edge Off Broadway (The Edge Theater’s black box), 1133 W. Catalpa. Select performances will be available for live streaming.
FREE
Tickets available Thursday, June 1
The Fighting Words Festival is Babes With Blades’s script development program and in 2023 is expanded to two weekends. Each season, three scripts are chosen for development and read three times; first within the company, then with a small group of invited guests and finally as part of this annual festival that includes all three plays. In 2023, the scripts include The Gatekeepers by Jillian Leff (she/her/hers); Sin Agua by Desi Moreno-Penson (she/her/hers) and Rich B*tch by Rachel Lynett (she/her/hers). Discussions after each reading provide feedback for the playwrights, assisting them in developing their scripts further. Fighting Words’ plays have been given full productions by the company as with Cat McKay’s Plaid As Hell from the 2020 Fighting Words Festival that was produced by BWBTC during its 2021 – 2022 season.
The Duchess of Malfi
By John Webster
Directed by BWBTC Artistic Director Hayley Rice (she/her/hers)
September 8 – October 21, 2023
Previews: Friday, Sept. 8 and 15 at 8 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 9 at 8 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 10 at 2:30 p.m. and Thursday, Sept. 14 at 8 p.m.
Opening: Saturday, Sept. 16 at 8 p.m.
Regular Run: Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m.
Closing: Saturday, Oct. 21 at 8 p.m.
The Factory Theater, 1623 W. Howard St.
Select performances will be available for live streaming.
Ticket Price: $28 – $35
Tickets on sale: Monday, August 21
When the widowed Duchess of Malfi chooses to love again, honestly and defiantly, the men in her family do everything in their power to break those that would dare to flout the unspoken rules of a “traditional” society. “Despite the 407 years between the premiere of Duchess of Malfi and today, in some ways very little has changed,” states director Hayley Rice. “This production will focus on the theme of the power held, and desperately clung to, by a patriarchal society, and how something as simple as two people openly loving each other outside of that dichotomy is an inherent threat to those in power, then and today.” Rice continues, “Toxic masculinity is still an insidious disease. It lashes out at marginalized communities. It also eats away at some men, making them feel, to paraphrase a section of the text, like they’re wearing a wolf-skin that is hairy on the inside.”
For more information, tickets and live performance streaming information, please visit BabesWithBlades.org.
ABOUT FIGHTING WORDS, how to take part in the process.
ABOUT BABES WITH BLADES THEATRE COMPANY
Babes With Blades Theatre Company – for over the past 20 years, and moving into the future – strives to develop and present scripts focused on complex, dynamic (often combative) characters who continue to be underrepresented on theatre stages based on gender. Babes With Blades Theatre Company uses (and will continue to use) stage combat to tell stories that elevate the voices of underrepresented communities and dismantle the patriarchy.
In each element of their programming, they embrace two key concepts:
- Folks of marginalized genders and underrepresented communities are central to the story, driving the action rather than responding or submitting to it.
- Everyone is capable of a full emotional and physical range, up to and including violence and its consequences
The company offers participants and patrons alike an unparalleled opportunity to experience every person as heroes and villains; rescuers and rescues; right, wrong and everywhere in between: exciting, vivid, dynamic PEOPLE. It’s as simple and as subversive as that.
BWBTC’s 2022 programming is partially made possible by the kind support of The Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, a grant from The Illinois Arts Council Agency, a CityArts Grant from the the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events (DCASE), and the support of the Small Business Alliance Shuttered Venue Operators (SVOG) grant program.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT STATEMENT:
Babes With Blades Theatre Company produces theatre in venues located on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. Many other tribes such as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, and Fox also called this area home. This region that we now commonly refer to as “The Chicagoland Area”, has long been a center for Indigenous people to gather, trade, and maintain kinship ties. Today, one of the largest urban Native American communities in the United States resides in Chicago. Members of this community continue to contribute to the life of this city and to celebrate their heritage, practice traditions and care for the land and waterways.