Online Streaming Event - PLEASE REGISTER at the link below
The new season of our RCI Digital Stage debuts with the online premiere of Bee Trapped Inside the Window, written by acclaimed Romanian-American playwright, poet, and ARTivist, Saviana Stănescu, and co-produced with HartBeat Ensemble, a Connecticut theater company committed to create provocative performances transcending traditional barriers of race, gender, class, and geography. Please reserve your tickets here.
Crafted with ingenuity and skill, with a rich texture of emotions and socio-political themes, the show explores modern-day slavery’s effect on the lives of three women of different backgrounds and ethnicities. May is an Asian-American in-house domestic worker for a wealthy family with kids; Sasha is a Russian-American corporate executive with a drinking problem; and Mia is Sasha’s black daughter, who is exploring and gradually understanding her own biracial identity. Unfolding in a series of monologues sliding into dialogue, the play follows Mia's coming-of-age story over the course of 15 years through her relationships with her mom and her neighbor, while turning the spotlight on the quiet sufferance of domestic workers and immigrants.
Bee Trapped Inside the Window is an online streaming event.
It premieres on Friday, February 26 at 7:30 pm and remains available on-demand through Sunday, March 21. Please follow this link to reserve your tickets!
This is a FREE EVENT but requires RESERVATION.
Bee Trapped Inside the Window
Written by Saviana Stănescu
Directed by Vernice Miller
Cast: Lydia Gaston, Erin Lockett, Jennifer Dorr White
Technical director: Godfrey Simmons
Stage Manager: Raymond Johannes Kraft
Sound Design: Gavin Heaney
Duration: 90 minutes
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Saviana Stănescu (playwright) is a cutting-edge Romanian playwright, poet, and ARTivist based in New York/Ithaca. Her US plays include Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, Ants, White Embers (all published by Samuel French), Useless, Toys, For A Barbarian Woman, Lenin’s Shoe, Waxing West (New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Play), What Happens Next, Bee Trapped Inside the Window. Honors include: Fulbright, Indie Theatre Hall of Fame, John Golden Award, KulturKontakt, Marulic Prize, Best Play of the Year UNITER Award. Saviana's plays have been developed/produced off-Broadway at Women’s Project, La MaMa, 59E59, NYTW, EST, HERE, New Georges, Lark; regionally at the Hangar Theatre, Cherry Artspace, Civic Ensemble; and globally at Teatro La Capilla in Mexico City, Teatrul Odeon in Bucharest, Dramalabbet in Stockholm, etc. (www.saviana.com)
Vernice Miller (director) is a performer, director, producer, and activist whose stage work includes directing Three Women (Break the Silence) by anthropologist Dr. Omotayo Jolaosho at the Market Theater Laboratory in Johannesburg before touring South Africa. In Slovenia and Poland, she performed and co-directed Nomansland for Seth Baumrin’s Subpoetics International. Vernice Miller directed the inaugural production of Bee Trapped Inside the Window by Saviana Stănescu, commissioned by Civic Ensemble in Ithaca, NY. For network television, she shadowed director Felix Alcala on the CBS series Madam Secretary throughout filming of season 6 episode 9 Carpe Diem. She has collaborated with jazz musician Wynton Marsalis on Eatonville, a Zora Neal Hurston project, and spent ten years working internationally with HBO comedienne Hazelle Goodman. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in NYC. In 1995, with Joann Maria Yarrow, Vernice Miller co-founded A Laboratory for Actor Training Experimental Theatre Company, to evolve the work they began with Roberta Carreri at Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret in Denmark. She is the recipient of the London New Play Festival's Best Actress Award for her solo performance of Medea: Now. (www.ALATetc.org)
HartBeat Ensemble
Founded in 2001, HartBeat Ensemble's mission is to create provocative theater that connects our community beyond traditional barriers of race, gender, class and geography.
HartBeat Ensemble is the only institution in Hartford, CT that is consistently using theater to speak powerfully across different generations, races, populations and interest groups. As an ensemble of artist-activists, they create as well as present innovative productions based on critical civic issues. HartBeat offers audiences the chance to experience and respond to the work they have just seen through live performance and guided conversations. HartBeat’s original, full-length creative works include the award-winning Flipside, the critically acclaimed Jimmy & Lorraine, and this year's sold-out hit Pegao by Ensemble member Cin Martinez. HartBeat continues to inspire the next generation of leaders to create change for a better world through its Youth Play Institute. HartBeat is an artist-led, artist-driven company dedicated to building community partnerships and helping to integrate the arts into the community’s civic agenda.
PRESS:
Broadway World: https://www.broadwayworld.com/
The Westerly Sun: https://www.thewesterlysun.com/
Courant: https://www.courant.com/