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Trojan Barbie
7F, 4M
Past and present violently collide when Lotte, an English tourist who repairs dolls, is captured while on a tour of current-day Troy and flung back into the ancient camp of Euripides’ Trojan Women. Her vacation gone horribly wrong, Lotte is finally rescued and life returns to normal–until Hecuba claws her way into the 21st century in search of her murdered children.
Production:
American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.), 2009; dir. Carmel O’Reilly.
{Production Photos}
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Awards:
Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, 2007.
Playwrights First “Plays for the 21st Century” Award, 2009.
Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, 2009.
Finalist, Griffin Award (Australia).
Publication: Theatre Forum, June 2009.
Samuel French, 2010.
Weightless
3M, 2F
An American family become trapped in their penthouse apartment, isolated from the world by wealth, fear, and an excessive attention to hygiene. A live in maid is constantly remodeled by her plastic surgeon mistress, at the cost of her memory, gender and sense of gravity. But when gravity returns, the family’s mirror-ball world explodes, leaving a surprising survivor.
Production:
Workshop production, Brown New Plays Festival
Perishable Theatre; dir. Vanessa Gilbert. {Production Photos}
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Awards:
Weston Award for Dramatic Writing.
Slow Falling Bird
5M, 4F
Set in an Immigrant Detention Center in the Australian desert, Slow Falling Bird travels between two young asylum seekers from Afghanistan, a pair of guards of ambiguous morality and a refugee whose ailing newborn’s spirit haunts the play, refusing to incarnate into the desperate situation she sees below her. Adding to the disorder is the agoraphobic wife of one of the guards who longs for a child, but fears her husbands touch. The stakes involve a bargain for the newborn’s survival, struck between the refugee and the guard- a bargain that proves to be very expensive for all involved.
Productions:
Crowded Fire; dir. Rebecca Novick. {Production Photos}
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Student productions:
Metro Arts, Brisbane; Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Awards: Rella Lossy Playwriting Award
Monash National Play Award
Finalist, Patrick White Award.
Pussy Boy
3M, 3F
PUSSY BOY is a dark and poetic urban fable, where racial and class tensions play out under a freeway overpass. Bill, a violent single father, tries to teach his dreamy son Algy how to repair buildings. But when Bill evicts their derelict tenant Daphne (and a singing Police Chorus confiscate her 14 dogs) Algy runs away. Bill tracks him down, finding him hiding with the Dog Lady, and a deadly test of loyalty is forced upon Algy.
Production:
Workshop production, Brown New Plays Festival, dir. Vanessa Gilbert
Co-op production, Belvoir St. downstairs, dir. Chris Mead.
Awards: Weston Award in Dramatic Writing.
My Vicious Angel
2F (play with music)
Pearl, a fallen trapeze artist, lands in hospital with a broken spine. Her childhood twin Merle haunts her and, through songs and games, tricks Pearl into revisiting a long-buried past. A kitchen tango, a parrot’s betrayal, a father gone to sea and finally, an exchange in the haunted hospital room itself allow the twins to complete a story from which Pearl has fled and in which Merle has remained trapped until now.
Production:
Vitalstatistix, Australia
Belvoir St. Theatre, Australia
Adelaide International Festival of the Arts. Dir. (all productions) Rosalba Clemente.
Awards:
Adelaide Critics Circle Award, Outstanding Production.
Finalist: Western Australian Premier’s Award; Victorian Premiere’s Award; Australian Writers’ Guild Best Drama (AWGIE) Award.
Mothergun (One-act)
3M, 2F
A group of three survivors from a fraticidal war, who have no common language, struggle to survive in the mud of a camp with only an unreliable translator to keep their fragile peace. A child soldier leads the way to safety, but at a terrible price.
Production:
Perishable Theatre; dir. Vanessa Gilbert.
Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway One-Act Play Festival.
Lincoln Center Director’s Lab at HERE.
Emergency Theatre Project, Mid-town International Theatre Festival (NYC).
Student production, Wheaton College MA, dir. Caitlin Stewart-Swift
Student production, Tasmania.
Awards: Perishable Theatre Women’s Playwriting Festival winner.
All Souls’ Day (10 minute play)
A child and her silent aunt are stranded on a beach in the aftermath of a civil war. Through game-playing and a dangerous game of hide and seek, the child pressures her aunt to return to the land of the living and admit the truth about her disappeared cousin.
Production:
Perishable Theatre
Actors Theatre, Sonoma County
Boston Theater Marathon.
Awards: Perishable Women’s Playwriting Festival winner
Heideken Award Finalist.
Publication:
Theatron
The Australian Reader Online.
Originally from Australia, Christine Evans is an internationally produced playwright now resident in the U.S. Her work has been produced and developed at the American Repertory Theater (Trojan Barbie, world premiere), Playbox Theatre, U.K., New Vic (London), Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney), the Adelaide International Festival of the Arts, Deck Chair Theatre, Vitalstatistix, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the Magic Theatre, Theater Simple, Live Girls!, Kitchen Dog Theatre, hotINK Play Festival, Bricolage Theatre, Synchronicity Theatre, Perishable Theatre, New Jersey Rep, Crowded Fire, Ohio Theatre (NYC), The Irish Rep (NYC), Boston Playwrights Theater, Rattlestick Theatre, the Women’s Project, Centenary Stage and Cutting Ball. In 2013, HERE presents the world premiere of her newest work, You Are Dead. You Are Here., a cutting-edge collaboration with media designer Jared Mezzocchi and director Joseph Megel, in NYC.
Honors include an Australia Council for the Arts New Work Award, a Rockefeller Bellagio Center Fellowship, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, a Millay Colony Fellowship, the 2007 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award; the 2009 Playwrights Theatre “Plays for the 21st Century” Award; the 2009 Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship; a Fulbright Award in Visual and Performing Arts; the Rella Lossy Playwriting Award; the Monash National Playwriting Award (Australia); the Weston Award in Dramatic Writing; and Perishable Theatre’s Women’s Playwriting Award (2000 and 2001).
Christine is a Core Member of the Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis, a Women’s Project Playwrights’ Lab alum and member of the Dramatists Guild. She holds an M.F.A. (Playwriting) and a Ph.D. (Theatre & Performance Studies) from Brown. She taught playwriting at Harvard from 2007-2012 and in 2012, joined Georgetown University’s faculty as an Assistant Professor in Theatre and Performing Arts.
Representation
Peregrine Whittlesey Agency
279 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024
Tel: (212) 787-1802
Email: pwwagy@aol.com
Contact
Plays
War Plays Published by NoPassport Press, 2013
Trojan Barbie Published by Samuel French, 2011.
Out of Time and Place: An Anthology of Plays by the Women’s Project Playwrights’ Lab
Edited by Alexis Clements with Christine Evans. Introduction by Therese Rebeck. Published by the Women’s Project.
Excerpts from several of Evans’ plays are featured in Smith & Kraus’
The Best Women’s Stage Monologues and Scenes, 2010 and
The Best Men’s Stage Monologues and Scenes, 2010
Theatre Forum Issue # 35, June 2009: Trojan Barbie
Slow Falling Bird, available through AustralianPlays.org
Mothergun, available through AustralianPlays.org
Weightless, available through AustralianPlays.org
My Vicious Angel, available through AustralianPlays.org
Hunter Online Theatre Review: Home to Roost
The Australian Reader: Home to Roost and All Souls’ Day
Perishable Theatre Women’s Playwriting Festival Anthology
Mothergun (2000) and All Souls’ Day (2001).
Articles
Forced Entertainment: Radical Theatre of Failure
Published in RealTime, Issue 78.
Surface Tension: Theatre in New York.
(On Mac Wellman’s Cat’s Cradle and Sarah Kane’s Crave.)
Published in RealTime Issue 41.
The Theatre of War, The Murder of Bridges: On Dah Teatar in Belgrade, 2001.
Published in Realtime
The Peace Review. “Asylum Seekers and Border Panic in Australia”. Issue 15.2. Summer, 2003
Available as .pdf here.
CHAIN 9: Dialogues (Temple University Press)
“One More Transparent Bridge” (with D. Milosevic), 2002
(To read this article, download .pdf 2 here).
Fiction
“Black Paper,” 100% Synthetic, U.W.S. Press: 1997
“Crazy Paving and Roses”, Fibs and Fallen Angels, U.T.S. Writers Group 1996.
(ISBN: 0646216899)
Trojan Barbie
OC Weekly
–The best thing that can be said about a playwright you’ve experienced for the first time is that you can’t wait for the next play. Based on Trojan Barbie, Christine Evans should be on the radar of anyone who cares about contemporary American theater.
-Joel Beers, September 27, 2012.
Georgetown Voice
It’s rare that something so astoundingly original can come out of an adaptation of an ancient Greek tragedy, yet Trojan Barbie proves how the human experience of loss and love endures in a fresh and captivating way. A modern interpretation of a classic, then, becomes a masterpiece in its own right.
- Elizabeth Baker, April 11, 2013.
Edge Boston - Trojan Barbie
…as hard-edged and eloquent as slam poetry… Evans wants us to ask the question no one poses: What happens to women in warfare? She clearly also wants us to think once again about Euripides’ original query concerning the place of war and aggression in a society that sees itself as blessed, just, and righteous.
– Killian Melloy, April 10, 2009
Talkin Broadway - Trojan Barbie
Explosive new work . . . an imaginative, time-warped view of the ongoing challenges women have faced since foreign conflict first raged thousands of years ago.
- Matthew Small, April 15, 2009
Harvard Crimson. Arts. ‘Barbie’ revives, revises tragedy.
Like Euripides’ play, “Trojan Barbie” draws its poignancy from the intimate. . . As if to the drums of war, the play marches to an internal beat, and its fury of personal devastation crescendos to the climactic shattering of the play’s illusions.
– Lillian Yu, April 26, 2009
In melding ancient and modern, Evans creates some artful parallels and searing images…
- Carolyn Clay, Boston Phoenix, April 10, 2009
Tufts Daily - A.R.T.’s re-visioning of Euripides contrasts classic tragedy with modern warfare
- by Victoria Petrosino
Boston Globe - Suffering across the ages
…her ‘Trojan Barbie’ shares visions of women and war
- by Megan Tench
Weekly Dig - Trojan Barbie
Is not a Barbie girl, nor in a Barbie’s world
- by David Day
Boston Metro - All Dolled Up
‘Barbie’ playwright says what ends badly ends well
- by Linda Laban l
Weightless
A hilarious but disturbing look at lives in isolation, full of tragically fractured connections that might inspire you to reach out and touch someone. . . Weightless’s world is simultaneously real and surreal, making the play both familiar and foreign… It’s well acted, well directed and very well-written.
-Evangeline Kurz-Nelson, Brown Daily Post, November, 2007
Providence Journal – Perishable Theatres’ Weightless is fun and a bit scary too
Evans’ script combines a strong sense of humor with the surreal and keeps at least one foot grounded in the reality we know . . . Being Weightless, or at least striving to be, is fun and a bit scary as well.
– Jim Seavor, The Providence Journal, October 30, 2007
Providence Journal – A weightless experience at Perishable Theatre
Preview article, Channing Grey, October 2007
Boston Phoenix – Theater- Intense States
Preview article, Bill Rodriguez, October 2007
Slow Falling Bird
SF Chronicle - Prison camp story will seem familiar here even though it’s from a land far, far away
Preview article, Sam Hurwitt, June 2005
Powerful visuals and wrenching personal drama . . . in the final scenes the slow falling stops and the soaring begins.
– Chad Jones, Oakland Tribune, July 2005.
SF Bay Times - Slow Falling Bird: A sad but needed tale
Evans writes from the gut with a darkly gritty world-view. . . . Evans wisely fleshes out the humanity of all her characters, good and bad, sexual and cultural, victim and bully. She brilliantly utilizes the moon-like terrain of the Outback . . . to parallel the inhospitable geography of politics, where cruelty is the path of least resistance . . . A multi-layered, superlatively textured script.
-Tom W. Kelly, San Francisco Bay Times, August 11, 2005.
Pussy Boy
(Produced in Australia but not the U.S.)
–Evans, now writing from the US, again proves herself a master of construction and spare, evocative dialogue in a quasi-fantastic setting.
-Keith Gallasch, RealTime National Arts # 50
Evans’ play is a strongly crafted exercise in the tenuous and the unsettling… A well-acted urban tale of sadness, both touching and disturbing.
-Stephen Dunne, Sydney Morning Herald, 6/23/02
Mothergun
The most wrenching aspect of the play is a wild child soldier…Murderously happy, playing his stick rifle like a lethal air guitar… there’s a kind of innocence in how purely savage he has been trained by war to be. The character provides theme and coda to a successfully sustained cymbal crash of this short play. It’s fascinatingly written and performed.
-Bill Rodriguez, The Providence Phoenix, 6/1/02
A toe-curling vision of hell, set in a very contemporary refugee camp.
-Bill Gale, The Providence Journal, 6/3/01
Tough, well-written and acted. Mothergun is ‘in your face’ theatre . . . It has a lot to say in a short time.
-Don Fowler, Warwick Beacon, 5/31/01
My Vicious Angel
(produced in Australia but not the U.S.)
Christine Evans is about to join a small but select list of Australian playwrights who write with a peculiarly poetic intensity . . . My Vicious Angel seized me with the intensity, musicality and economy of its language, the power of its scenario and the potential of its theatricality.
-Keith Gallasch, RealTime, June-July 1998
Passionate, lyrical, witty and above all, adventurous.
-John Edge, The Bulletin, 8/4/98
Don’t miss this locally made masterpiece.
-Barry Lenny, Rip it Up, 07/98
A powerful and moving piece of theatre….My Vicious Angel is a must-see theatrical experience. A wonderful example of serious theatre at its best.
-Myk Mykyta, 5UV Radio Arts Magazine, 8/13/98
Hauntingly poetic work… an assured, organic chamber piece.
-Bryce Hallet, Sydney Morning Herald, 7/22/99
Lots going on in 2013! Publications, productions, and new adventures in Australia…
After three years’ collaboration with core team Jared Mezzocchi (media design) and Joseph Megel (direction), Christine’s latest play, You Are Dead. You Are Here. premieres in NYC at HERE, June 5-22nd
Christine’s plays Trojan Barbie, Slow Falling Bird and Mothergun are published together for the first time in her anthology, War Plays, published by NoPassport Press.
In October 2012, Trojan Barbie had its West Coast premiere at the Garage Theatre in LA, with subsequent productions at Questors’ Theatre in the UK and a DC area premiere at Georgetown University.
Mailing List
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