York Theatre Company’s Developmental Reading Series

06/01 – Orville and Wilbur Did It!, a new play with music: Can an acting troupe touring with a children’s musical about the Wright Brothers (including a magic singing bird) survive the actors’ inappropriate hook-ups, self-medication, rampant drug use, credit card scams, and pipe dreams of bringing the show to New York City? Orville and Wilbur Did It! looks at the subculture of touring children’s theatre, following the lives, loves, sadnesses, ecstasies, hopes, fears, and egos of five actors and a stage manager in a van doing a non-Equity, 58-city tour across America.

06/09 – Juliet and Juliet: the story of 17-year old Tommie Morgan, who has her heart set on a big fat lead role in the school production of Romeo and Juliet. Her hopes are dashed, though, when Homecoming Queen Caroline Pelletti is pre-cast as Juliet, as a result of nasty PTA politics. So Tommie settles for the next best thing: she disguises herself as a boy and auditions for Romeo instead. She expects people to be shocked, but she doesn’t expect to fall in love.

06/11 – Elsie Janis and the Boys, a salute to the ‘female Bob Hope of World War 1: Decades before the U.S.O. existed, Broadway and West End star Elsie Janis felt a calling to give comfort, cheer and entertain the Boys—the young fighting men of the First World War. In the final six months of the war, Elsie, armed only with her mother and a piano player, took her show to France, to the front, to field hospitals, to training camps, and to the very edges of combat, becoming the “Female Bob Hope” of WWI.

06/26 – Grounded for Life: The Musical: a “staying-of-age” comedy about Mitchell Mulligan, a thirty-something guy serving a life sentence in his childhood bedroom for throwing a snowball at a school bus when he was twelve. Twenty years later, in a literal case of arrested development, he is still doing his time.