- By Kitchen Theatre
- Entertainment
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The Unfortunates is a one-woman play whose central character, Mary Jane Kelly, has a problem. She's a pound forty behind in her rent, her window is broken, she has lost her key, and her boyfriend just moved out. And it's 1888—not a good time to be poor and "unfortunate" on the streets of London. Somewhere out there in the foggy shadows, one of the world's most notorious criminals is at work. Mary only has two ways to secure her own front door. One of them is prostitution. The other is selling something she shouldn't have in the first place, something that she'll have to betray her best friend and herself to give up. This new show by award-winning playwright Aoise Stratford explores such big issues as popular culture and women in Victorian society and more human concerns, such as the ways we choose to remember the ones we've lost and how that defines the way we live.
"We are so pleased to be able to present Aoise Stratford's work at the Kitchen," says KTC Artistic Director, Rachel Lampert. "She arrived in Ithaca only a short time ago and plinked herself down at the Kitchen's doorstep. Filled with wonderful ideas, she initiated and implemented our first 48-Hour Marathon New Play Events and has been curating them every since. She has been so supportive of other playwrights—glad that we can see her work center stage."
Aoise Stratford's plays have won numerous awards and have been produced in Italy, Australia, Canada, England, and throughout the USA. Several of her short plays and monologues have been published, and she was a contributor to The Art of Theatre Then and Now, published by Thompson Wadsworth. She has taught playwriting all over the country at conferences and festivals and has been a substitute lecturer at Cornell and an Artist in Residence at the University of Wyoming and at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. Locally, her play Ophelia's Hamlet had a reading as part of a presentation on Shakespeare at the Women's Community Building last year, and her play Henry's Wives just won the Gloria Allen Playwriting Award and will be presented at the Morgan Opera House in Aurora this fall. She has been the guest curator of the 48-Hour Play Festival at the Kitchen Theatre since its inception two and a half years ago. She also teaches for the Hangar Theatre's Project Four and occasionally directs readings of new work.
Krista Scott's directing credits include The Waiting Room and The Laramie Project at Ithaca College, Dancing at Lughnasa and Goodnight, Desdemona/Good Morning, Juliet at The University of Mississippi, Kiss Me, Kate, The Bacchae and The Glass Menagerie at the American University in Cairo, and original works of local playwrights George Sapio and Judith Pratt at the Kitchen Theatre. She was co-founder and associate director of The New Tradition Theatre Company in Saint Cloud, MN, where she directed Two Rooms, The Heidi Chronicles, Steel Magnolias and her own scripts of A Christmas Carol, Jack & the Beanstalk, and The Consecourse. Her acting venues include the Kitchen Theatre and the Hangar Theatre, and she is a frequent dialect/voice coach for numerous professional and university theatres in the region.
Meg Elliott is delighted to be performing at the Kitchen Theatre. She is a founding member of the improv comedy group Just Good Friends and a proud member of the Icarus Theatre Ensemble. Favorite roles include Claire in Boston Marriage, Viola in Twelfth Night and Rose in Dancing at Lughnasa. She also particularly enjoys the creative process of working on original scripts. In the fall she will be attending DePaul University to pursue an MFA in Acting.
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