BWBTC Events

Name: 2025 – Fighting Words Festival
Start: 2025-09-13T00:00:00-06:00
End: 2025-09-13T23:59:59-06:00
Location: Bramble Arts Loft

2025 – Fighting Words Festival

September 13

| $10

CHALLENGE IT ALL:
BABES WITH BLADES THEATRE COMPANY FIGHTING WORDS LOOKS AT IDENTITY IN ALL FORMS

People living their truth, no matter how inconvenient to society around them, can sometimes create heroes where least expected.

CHICAGO – Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s (BWBTC) 2025 season opens with an extended run of their new works festival, collectively called Fighting Words, running September 6th – 14th at the Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 N. Clark St, 2nd Floor. All performances start at a $10 suggested price and audiences can provide feedback on the scripts following each reading.

“Audiences underestimate how much they can influence a new play simply by attending a reading,” states Hayley Rice, Artistic Director of BWBTC. “While written notes and critiques are invaluable, just hearing how an audience connects with a story in the moment is pivotal for playwrights. Fighting Words is an opportunity to do exactly that: All three shows bring something very different to the stage,” continues Rice. “Chicago theater, and BWBTC especially, is not afraid to tell new narratives that represent folks from every corner of society and history, and this season’s festival does that.”

FIGHTING WORDS FESTIVAL

September 6th & 7th, 13th & 14th

Performance Running Time: TBA
Ticket Price: Beginning at $10
Location: Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 N. Clark St, 2nd Floor.Select performances will be available for streaming.

Each weekend the festival will have staged readings of the 2025 selections:

CALVARIA: A PLAY FOR FERAL GIRLS

Written by: Maggie Smith (she/her)
Directed by: BWBTC Ensemble Member Morgan Manasa (she/her)
Fight Direction by: Jessica Pennachio (she/her)

Saturday, September 6th, 2025 – 2:30pm

Saturday, September 13th, 2025 – 7:30pm

When her family’s bull is found decapitated in the middle of a farm field, Edie Hruska makes it her mission to find the culprit. While on her search, she comes across a group of young girls claiming to communicate with gods, begging Edie to become their newest acolyte. While acclimating to their lifestyle, Edie finds herself face-to-face with the girls’ true intentions, and they are much more sinister than just a dead bull. (CALVARIA is the 2025-2026 winner of BWBTC’s Margaret W. Martin Award and the Joining Sword & Pen International Playwriting Competition)

TWO OUT OF THREE FALLS

Written by: Bill Daniel (he/him)
Directed by: BWBTC Artistic Associate Ashley Yates (she/her)
Fight Direction by: Axel Rico

Sunday, September 7th, 2025 – 2:30pm

Saturday, September 13th, 2025 – 2:30pm

Johanna Goodish was the child of notorious pro wrestler King Kong Bruiser. Thirty years ago, he was murdered in a locker room shower in Puerto Rico and the killer was never tried. The witnesses never talked. Since she began her own wrestling career, she has been trying to escape his shadow. And now, she’s been seeing his ghost. When an opportunity for revenge presents itself, she takes it. But it means she’ll be face to face in the ring with the man who held the knife when it happened.

YO HO

Written by: SMJ (they/them)
Directed by: BWBTC Artistic Associate Maureen Yasko (she/her)
Fight Direction by: Carly Belle Cason

Saturday, September 6th, 2025 – 7:30pm

Saturday, September 14th, 2025 – 2:30pm

Yo ho charts the journey of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two pirates aboard a campy, sexually charged ship under immediate threat from the crown. Equal parts historical fantasy and introspective sexual & gender exploration, this play is a deeply emotional reimaging and reminder of our queer histories.

ABOUT MAGGIE SMITH, PLAYWRIGHT OF CALVARIA

Maggie Smith (she/her) is an playwright, performer, and comedian based in Chicago, Illinois. Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, Maggie moved to Chicago to attend Loyola University Chicago, where she received a BA in Theatre, while minoring in English and Shakespeare Studies. At Loyola, Maggie led two projects, Rats and Saint Louise, Pray for Us, the first being a devised parody musical and the second a staged reading of her two-act play. Upon graduating Loyola, she was accepted into the Second City’s Conservatory Training Program, where she completed her training in September, 2023. As a writer, Maggie challenges herself and her audiences to process difficult topics through comedic lenses. She takes from her own life experiences to create a casual representation of the queer experience. In order to depict an experience that she is familiar with, she prefers to write characters in stories where their identities are not the driving force of the piece. Because of this, she finds herself called to place queer characters at the forefront of comedies. After all, that’s what her life is.

ABOUT BILL DANIEL, PLAYWRIGHT OF TWO OUT OF THREE FALLS

Bill Daniel is an actor/playwright living in the city of Chicago. A graduate of Illinois State University, Bill has spent over a decade in Chicago creating silly stories for silly people. As a playwright, he has written for WildClaw Theatre (Hell Followed With Her, Cavities), E.D.G.E. Theatre (Holmes vs. Holmes, What’s All This Then, La Mousquetaire, Through Black Glass), Illinois State University’s Freestage Festival (The Glass Man, Pingree Road), McHenry County College (What’s All This Then), The Living Canvas (Rain), Nothing Special Productions (Manhunt: The Great Waldo Search), Woodstock’s TownSquare Players (Sitting at the Kid’s Table), Hobo Junction (The Great Sloppy Joe Extermination, Steeping the Tea) and Wayward Productions (Frock Club). In 2013, Bill undertook a project inspired by Suzan Lori-Parks, wherein he wrote a short play every day for an entire year.

ABOUT SMJ, PLAYWRIGHT OF YO HO

SMJ (they/them) is a mixed-Latiné, non-binary playwright and theatermaker originally from Mount Vernon, OH. They were a 2022-2023 Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow. Currently, SMJ is creating work with Latinx Playwrights Circle, The Orchard Project, and Andy’s Summer Playhouse. Their work has been seen in various forms with Ars Nova, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, New York Stage and Film, Latiné Musical Theatre Lab, National Queer Theater, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Otterbein University, Wright State University, University of Texas-El Paso, Art House Productions, The Road Theatre Company, The Flea Theater, Live Arts, The DR2 Theatre, The Vineyard Theatre, American Theatre Group, The Arden Theater, and The Tank. SMJ has been a finalist for the 2024-25 Princess Grace Award in Playwriting at New Dramatists, 2024 June Bingham New Playwright Commission, 2023 Parity Development Award, 2024 Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative at Illinois State University, and Write Out Loud as well as a semifinalist for the O’Neill’s National Playwrights Conference (three times), the 2022-23 Princess Grace Award in Playwriting at New Dramatists, and the Van Lier Fellowship at Rattlestick Theater. Member of the Dramatists Guild and Ring of Keys. www.smjwrites.com

ABOUT THE FIGHTING WORDS FESTIVAL

Fighting Words is BWBTC’s script development program. Each season we choose three scripts for development and read each one aloud three times–first within the company, then with a small group of invited guests, and finally as part of a festival that includes all three plays. (Every other season the winner of BWBTC’s International Playwriting Competition and the Margaret W. Martin Award is automatically included as a part of the process.) During the festival, discussions after each reading provide feedback for the playwrights, assisting them in developing their scripts further.

ABOUT JOINING SWORD & PEN INTERNATIONAL PLAYWRIGHTING COMPETITION AND THE MARGARET W. MARTIN AWARD

The Joining Sword & Pen international playwriting competition launched in 2005 to generate more scripts that featured women in roles involving stage combat. Created in collaboration with Artistic Advisor and Fight Master in the Society of American Fight Directors David Woolley who sponsors the competition, scripts inspired by a specific image are submitted and go through a blind judging process. The winning script goes through BWBTC’s new play development program, but also receives a full production, cash prize and the Margaret W. Martin Award.

Margaret W. Martin was ahead of her time. In the 1960s and 70s, she maintained her full time job, taught piano, and raised a family of 6 children (4 girls, two boys) all while she traveled the globe from the States to Saudi Arabia, across Europe and Vientiane Laos during the height of the Vietnam war. She founded the American International School – Riyadh (K-12) in Saudi Arabia in 1963, and it has flourished as an institution since then. The Margaret W. Martin Award is in honor of Artistic Advisor and SAFD Fight Master David Woolley’s mother.