SARAH MARKSTEINER
NYC Performer - Playwright - Librettist
ABANDON ALL HOPE: BEES WHO ENTER HERE
One Act - Dark Comedy / Satire
In this apocalyptic satire, Amazonia gets herself pregnant with a hive of bees. No really, she “gets herself” pregnant. But with who, where, when, what position? No one, nowhere, never, and… missionary. As a dystopic world somewhere between book club and the book of revelations descends into disarray, Amazonia becomes the Missionary that must lead her growing hive into the promised land. All the while, a smooth transatlantic radio voice reminds us of such facts as: Queen bees were referred to as Kings up until a few hundred years ago when a female scientist actually bothered to check.
I HATE ART
One Act - Mixed Genre
Modern day college student Lizzie accepts a job modeling for her best friend's figure drawing class. In a fantastical imagining of a timeline past, wealthy Bostonian art collector and audacious public personality Isabella Stewart Gardner navigates her artistic pursuits under the scrutiny of Gilded Age society. As Isabella challenges the censorship of her own body, we hear her frustrations echoed a hundred years later when Lizzie faces the damning delineations between nude portraits and nude photographs.
LADY TONGUE
Full Length - Contemporary Companion Piece (Shakespeare's Cymbeline)
Besides our leading lady Imogen, the unnamed 'evil' queen is the only woman to survive to the start of Cymbeline. This play is populated by the women who died before Shakespeare's starts. What happened to the beloved late queen, the wet nurse who fled the palace with Imogen's lost brothers, and the warrior woman who returns via dream sequence to plead to Jupiter for her son's life? And most importantly, what circumstances made it impossible for women (who are not the heartless queen we later come to know) impossible to survive?
