Salon Reading Series

New Jersey Rep’s play reading festival.

Readings start at 7 and no reservations accepted; strictly first come, first served!

1/30/2012: Ants by Saviana Stanescu – A comedy exploring the biochemistry of job loss, motherhood and immigration, as well as the personal science of turning worker ants into queens, while surviving in the world of ants and humans with an accent.

03/12/2012: Where You End…I Begin by Jesse Mu-En Shao – Samuel rejects his Chinese immigrant background and his grandmother’s embarrassing traditions until he is forced to confront the painful legacy of tragedy and war that haunts his family.

03/19/2012: The Great Man by Charlie Schulman – Loosely inspired by James Atlas’s decade-long, painful experience writing the biography of the Nobel Prize winning author, Saul Bellow.

04/23/2012: Pa’s Hat by Cori Thomas – They say you can’t go home again, but sometimes you must. An elderly former Ambassador and his rebellious daughter return to war-torn Liberia where they are arrested by a gun toting child soldier and are confronted with life threatening danger. Civil unrest, politics, national heritage, and family responsibility all converge in this taut and tender drama.

04/30/2012: Student Playwrights Project – An annual event featuring four new plays written by playwriting students from Monmouth University.

05/07/2012: Night Blooms by Margaret Baldwin – On the cusp of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965, a Southern matriarch decides to have a cocktail party to witness the rare flowering of her late mother’s treasured night-blooming cereus, so she calls in her African American maid to fry the chicken and make the potato salad. Never mind that the whole world is watching and that the town could go up in flames.