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Happy Holidays & Thank You!

All of us here at Nora’s Playhouse hope your holidays have been merry!

As we head into 2023, we wanted to take a moment to say THANK YOU to all of our supporters, volunteers, members, and collaborators who helped to rouse us from our pandemic slumber in 2022. We couldn’t have done it without you!

In May, you joined us as Nora’s celebrated (and raised awareness of our cause and funds for our work) at the marvelous Hot Pink Party. This fall, we couldn’t have brought Martha Pichey’s Ashes & Ink to audiences in Montgomery, Alabama without the hard work of a lot of fabulous people and the loving support of all who bought tickets to see this powerful and intelligent new play. And, in 2022, we were fortunate to receive generous grants from both the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Leonore Foundation in support of our efforts to create professional opportunities for women theatre artists to collaborate to tell women’s stories.

We’re looking forward to bringing back other programming like The Nora’s Salon, Salon South, and The Nora Project: Women Write in the coming months. We will keep you posted as we figure out all of the details.

Wishing you a bright and happy new year!

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What Nora’s Playhouse Did This Summer: Julie Kling

In the nine week interval between our July and September gatherings of The Nora Salon, the Nora’s team has been busy! Here’s what some of our members were up to over the summer break:

Nora’s Playhouse Artistic Associate Julie Kling spent the summer combining her background in college admissions with her feminist values to launch Global Girls Prep – a new education company that takes an empowering, women-centered approach to college admissions counseling and college tours. She attended two wonderful conferences- one for college admissions professionals at Case Western Reserve University where she met the incredible Shabana Basij-Rasikh – a pioneer in women’s education and founder of SOLA– the first boarding school for girls in Afghanistan. She also went to Feminist Camp (!) in NYC – a wonderful program that helps young professionals explore feminism beyond theory. The group met with a range of organizations throughout NYC dedicated to reproductive justice, civic journalism, and of course, women in the arts!

Julie + Jane Addams (the ‘mother’ of Social Work and first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.) Swarthmore College was kind enough to let Julie and her students explore the archives of their Peace Collection during a recent college tour!

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What Nora’s Did This Summer: Sharon Friedman

In the nine week interval between our July and September gatherings of The Nora Salon, the Nora’s team has been busy! Here’s what some of our members were up to over the summer break:

In July, Nora’s Playhouse Literary Curator Sharon Friedman had two papers focused on women playwrights presented at Border Crossings: Translation, Migration, & Gender in the Americas, the Translatantic & the Transpacific, a conference in Bordeaux, France sponsored by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW).  The first paper, Re-Presenting the Wages of War: Interrogating the Boundaries between Fact and Truth in the War Plays by Helen Benedict and Paula Vogel, was presented as part of the panel Crossing Genres in Plays by American Women organized by the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS).  It examines two theatrical productions by women writers that have worked with returning soldiers to bring their stories to the stage: Helen Benedict’s The Lonely Soldier Monologues and Paula Vogel’s Don Juan Returns from Iraq.  The second, Recruits in the ‘Army of Women’: Mary Heaton Vorse and Susan Glaspell, presented as part of the panel Beyond Borders: Susan Glaspell and her Sisters from the Provincetown Players for the International Susan Glaspell Society (ISGS), examines the intersections and intertextualities in the life and works of labor journalist, political organizer, and international feminist Mary Heaton Vorse, whose Provincetown wharf provided the original stage for the Provincetown Players in 1915, and Susan Glaspell, founding member and one of the principal playwrights for the Players.  (Sharon sits on the board of ISGS.)