Media Release: March 10, 2006
Contact: Brian Gaston
401-863-2730 | Brian_Gaston@brown.edu | www.brown.edu/tickets

Brown Theatre and Sock & Buskin present

The Hungry Woman
(A Mexican Medea)
by Cherríe L Moraga
Directed by Patricia Ybarra

April 13-16 & 20-23, 2006
Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm
Leeds Theatre, Catherine Bryan Dill Center for the Performing Arts
77 Waterman Street, Providence RI

Regular Admission: $15
Senior Citizens & Brown Employees: $10
Students: $5
For tickets and further information: 401-863-2838
Or visit www.brown.edu/tickets

A re-interpretation of the classical tragedy that incorporates Mesoamerican mythology to explore the struggles of a Lesbian Xicana Medea, exiled from the Chicano homeland she helped to create.

Set in a “muy blade runneresque” version of Phoenix, Arizona where all colored joteria (queers) now live, Medea and her lover Luna try to raise Chac Mool, Medea’s child from her marriage with Jason. Medea’s exile came after Jason found her in bed with Luna. Chac, now thirteen, must face a decision, stay with his mother or go back to Aztlan with his father, who now wants Chac back because his son will help him reach the indigenous blood quantum Jason needs to stay. Medea meanwhile is facing the demise of her relationship with Luna, largely due to her willingness to do anything to keep her son. Told in multiple time frames, Hungry Woman moves between the time leading up to her decision to kill her son and her subsequent institutionalization after she has committed the murder.

Director Patricia Ybarra specializes in theatre historiography of the Americas, with emphasis on the relationship between theatre, nationalism, and American identities in North America. She is currently writing her first manuscript, Performing Conquest: Theatre, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico 1538-2003. She is also the Latino/a Focus group conference planner for ATHE. She is also a director, dramaturg and the former administrator of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. She recently directed Wedekind’s Lulu, after years of working with new scripts and company-devised works. She is especially pleased to be directing the East Coast premiere of this amazing play.

Cherríe Moraga is a poet, playwright and essayist, and the co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of numerous plays including Shadow of a Man and Watsonville: Some Place Not Here (both won the Fund for New American Plays Award, in 1991 and 1995 respectively), and Heroes and Saints, which earned the Pen West Award for Drama in 1992. Her plays have been anthologized in numerous collections and are also available in a three-volume series of collected works published by West End Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico, including The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea. Her collected non-fiction writings include: The Last Generation (South End Press); a memoir, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (Firebrand Books); and a new expanded edition of the now-classic Loving in the War Years, republished by South End Press in 2000. Ms. Moraga is also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts' Theatre Playwrights' Fellowship and is the Artist-in-Residence in the Departments of Drama and Portuguese at Stanford University. She is currently completing a new selection of essays entitled, A Xicanadyke Codex of Changing Consciousness: Essays for the Turn of a Century.