VB READS

Feast & Fiction

Two Play Readings and Talkbacks With the Audience

MONICA: THIS PLAY IS NOT ABOUT MONICA LEWINSKY

July 14th, 2018 @ 9pm

Through a series of scenes between Monica Lewinsky and different imagined lovers, this play asks what the cost of intimacy is, how we reckon with our past selves, and what we talk about when we talk about Other Women. Jumping in time between 1990 and 2017, we meet Monica at pivotal moments in her life: struggling to commit to couples’ therapy; realizing she’s about to meet a lover’s family for the first time; in the middle of a one night stand far away from home; in the moments after she’s lost her virginity; trying to comfort a partner who’s lost a parent; and watching Donald Trump become elected President. 

While many of Monica’s lovers appear only once in the play, every other scene focuses on the relationship between Monica and Sam, a recent divorcee who wants to build a new life with her. Rather than offer a definitive Lewinsky biography or focus on the scandal that brought her worldwide notoriety, this play offers a contradictory portrait of a contradictory woman, and allows us a chance to ponder, personally and nationally, just when it all went wrong. 

COLLECTED STORIES

July 17th, 2018 @ 8pm

Playwright Donald Margulies explores the vexed emotional and legal question of a writer's right to create art from the biographical material of another person's life--particularly when that other person is also a writer. Meditating upon the recent, real-life conflict between poet Stephen Spender and novelist David Leavitt, Margulies has created two of the most vivid and moving fictional characters of his career: Ruth Steiner, an aging, highly regarded author who never wrote about her youthful affair with real-life poet Delmore Schwartz, and Lisa Morrison, a student of Steiner's who, after publishing a much-praised first short-story collection under Steiner's direction, follows up with a novel that draws upon the Schwartz affair.