Jasper Presents the Staged Reading of the 2022 Play Right Series Winning Play -- Moon Swallower by Colby Quick

MOON SWALLOWER STAGED READING

SUNDAY AUGUST 28TH — 4 PM

at CMFA

TICKETS $10 ADVANCE - $12 AT THE DOOR

The Jasper Project presents the staged reading of a brand-new play, Moon Swallower by novice playwright, Colby Quick.

Quick is the winner of Jasper’s second Play Right Series competition in which he competed with other unpublished playwrights for an opportunity to have his play workshopped and developed by a team of seasoned theatre artists with the end result being a staged reading and the option of further development toward a fully realized stage production.

Moon Swallower will be presented at CMFA on Sunday August 28th at 4 pm with a talk back session and reception following the reading.

Moon Swallower is directed by Chad Henderson with a cast that includes Lonetta Thompson, Stann Gwynn, Becky Hunter, Richard Edwards, and Michael Hazin. Katie Leitner is the stage manager. Veteran playwright Jon Tuttle is the project manager for the 2022 Play Right Series.

The 2022 Jasper Play Right Series is made possible by the contributions of a team of Community Producers, all of whom will have contributed financially to the development of the project and have, reciprocally, been involved in the process from an educational perspective.

They are Bert Easter, Ed Madden, James Smith, Kirkland Smith, Bill Schmidt, Paul Leo, Eric Tucker, Cindi Boiter, Wade Sellers, and Jon Tuttle.

The purpose of the Play Right Series is to empower and enlighten Community Producers by allowing them insider views of the steps and processes of creating theatre art. In exchange for a  minimal financial contribution, Community Producers are invited to attend designated open readings and rehearsals, informal presentations by cast and crew, and opening night performances with producer credits. The result is that Community Producers learn about the extensive process of producing a play and become invested personally in the production and success of the play and its cast and crew, thereby become diplomats of theatre arts.

Community Producers’ names, and that of the Jasper Project, will also be permanently attached to the play and will appear in the published manuscript which will be registered with the Library of Congress and for sale via a number of standard outlets under the auspices of Muddy Ford Press and the imprint of the Jasper Project.

The Jasper Project produced their first Play Right Series in 2017, producing a staged reading of Randall David Cook’s Sharks and Other Lovers under the direction of Larry Hembree. 

About the playwright: Colby Quick is a thirty-one-year-old writer, singer, musician, actor, husband, and father of two. He is the lead singer and guitarist of a Stoner Doom band known as Juggergnome and in the development phase of a rap duo project called Ski & Beige. Colby played Ebenezer Scrooge in Northeastern Technical College’s stage production of A Christmas Carol in 2019 and is currently in his final semester at Francis Marion University as an English Major and Creative Writing Minor. “I have mostly written poems, songs, and short stories, as well as an unpublished novel.: Quick says. “When I was young, I would make stop-motion videos and I wrote scripts for all of them. I think this helped a lot with writing the Moon Swallower.”

About the project manager: Jon Tuttle is Professor of English and Director of University Honors at Francis Marion University, author of THE TRUSTUS COLLECTION (Muddy Ford Press, 2019), which includes six of his plays that premiered at Columbia’s Trustus Theatre, and a recipient of the South Carolina Governor’s Award in the Humanities.

Colby Quick Wins Play Right Series and You're Invited to Join the Play Right Project Team as a Community Producer

The Jasper Project is proud to announce the winner of our 2nd PLAY RIGHT SERIES project—Colby Quick for his play, Moon Swallower

Colby Quick is a thirty-one-year-old writer, singer, musician, actor, husband, and father of two. He is the lead singer and guitarist of a Stoner Doom band known as Juggergnome and in the development phase of a rap duo project called Ski & Beige. Colby played Ebenezer Scrooge in Northeastern Technical College’s stage production of A Christmas Carol in 2019 and is currently in his final semester at Francis Marion University as an English Major and Creative Writing Minor. “I have mostly written poems, songs, and short stories, as well as an unpublished novel.: Quick says. “When I was young, I would make stop-motion videos and I wrote scripts for all of them. I think this helped a lot with writing the Moon Swallower.”

Now it’s your chance to join the Jasper Project’s Play Right Series as a Community Producer.

Are you the kind of person who always wants to know more about the art you experience?

• Why did the playwright make their characters the way they did?

• What was the director trying to accomplish by having an actor move across stage, turn their back to the audience, or break into dance?

• How did an actor make me feel the way they did simply by turning their head?

If you have a passion for knowing more, understanding process, inspiration, and impetus, and seeing how a virgin play goes from page to stage, you are a good candidate for becoming a Jasper Project Play Right Series Community Producer.

 

What is a Community Producer?

Community Producers are important members of the Play Right Series Team who, in exchange for their investment of a modest amount of funding, ($250 each or $500 per couple) become engaged in the development of a virgin play from the first time the actors meet until the production of a staged reading of the play in front of an audience.

Between February and August 2022, Community Producers will gather monthly to explore the process of a play moving from page to stage with presentations that include

• ·         Meet the Playwright: Colby Quick

• ·         Meet the Director: Chad Henderson

• ·         First Table Reading with your host, Jon Tuttle

• ·         Behind the scenes with the Cast of Moon Swallower

• ·         Stage managing, props, costumes, lighting, & sound with your host, Jon Tuttle

• ·         And finally, a Staged Reading before a live audience with the Community Producers front and center as our esteemed Guests of Honor*

You’ll enjoy wine, cheese, socializing, and an assortment of other unique snacks at every event, as well as Jasper Project swag bags and FREE admission to the Jasper Project 10th Birthday Celebration rescheduled for Thursday April 14th at 701 Whaley!

* For the Staged Reading, Guests of Honor will be seated in the best seats in the house, acknowledged from the stage and in all programming, promotions, and press releases, as well as on the Jasper Project website and in the Fall 2022 issue of Jasper Magazine.

Play Right Series History

The Play Right Series is an endeavor to enlighten and empower audiences with information about the process involved in creating theatrical arts, at the same time that we engineer and increase opportunities for SC theatre artists to create and perform new works for theatre. Our first project in the Play Right Series was in 2017 when Larry Hembree led project members to ultimately produce a staged reading of Sharks and Other Lovers by SC playwright Randall David Cook. Sharks went on to win a number of awards and has been produced off-Broadway. SC Playwright Professor Jon Tuttle of Francis Marion University is overseeing this project for 2022 with a new team of theatre artists including Chad Henderson (director), Colby Quick (playwright), Cindi Boiter and Christina Xan (Community Producer Liaisons), and more.

The Jasper Project is currently recruiting 10 individuals to join the Play Right Series as Community Producers. Click here or write to Cindi@Jasper Columbia.com for more information.

Announcing the Accepted Contributions to 2021 Fall Lines - a literary convergence & Winners of the Broad River Prize for Prose and Saluda River Prize for Poetry

The Jasper Project, in conjunction with Richland Library, One Columbia for Arts and Culture and Richland Library Friends & Family , is proud to announce the authors whose work has been accepted for publication in part II of the combined seventh and eighth edition of Fall Lines – a literary convergence, as well as the recipients of the 2021 Fall Lines Awards for the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

Congratulations to

Kasie Whitener whose short fiction, The Shower,

was selected from more than one hundred prose submissions as the winner of the Broad River Prize for Prose, and to

Angelo Geter, whose poem, Black Girl Fly,

was selected from more than 400 submissions as the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry.

All additional contributors are listed below!

Judges for this year’s awards were

Randall David Cook for fiction and Nathalie Anderson for poetry. 

Mark your calendar for Sunday October 17th at 3 pm for the 2020-2021 Fall Lines Release and Reading at the Main Branch of the Richland Library. All contributors are invited to read ONE piece from the combined issues. The event is free and open to the public!

All accepted contributors should send a 75-word bio to be included in the journal to editor@JasperColumbia.com

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FOLLOWING!

Aida Rogers – From Proust to Gibbs

Hannah Pearson – Where the Fox and Hare Say Goodnight

Liesel Hamilton - Drifting

Susanne Kamata -  The Lump

Loli Molina Munoz - Distance(s)

Carla Damron - Breaking the Surface

Arthur McMaster - Connecting Flights

Kasie Whitener - The Shower

Tim Conroy - Pendleton Street

Debra Daniel - How to Make Peach Jam

 

Angelo Geter -  Black Girl Fly

Lisa Hase Jackson – Dead Birds of the Great Leap Forward

Ray McManus – When You Can’t Tell the Vine from the Branches

Landon Chapman – Odysseus

Ken McLaurin – Procrastination

Terri McCord – Sense Making

May O’Keefe Brady – Pandemic’s Box

Adam Corbett – The Keys and Gertrude Stein

Patricia Starek -  Glass Travels

Jenny Maxwell – My Father on Tap Dancing

Nicola Waldron – Peach Harvest

Ken Denk – Propitiating the Pulmonic Plague and After the Fight

Ruth Nicholson – At Congaree Swamp

Glenis Redmond – She Makes Me Think of Houses and For Dark-Skinned Black Women You Know it’s Not Just About the Red Lipstick

Judith Cumming Reese – Twilight Song

Eileen Scharenbroch – Sisters

Worthy Branson Evans – Blues For Want of a Blues Song

Kristine Hartvigsen – Journey

Roy Seeger – Alluvial Patterns

Randy Spencer – Invitation to the Plague and When it is Over

Betsy Thorne – Quarantined

Amanda Rachelle Warren – How Many Reasons for this Up and Gone

Jo Angela Edwins – The Lichtenberg Figure

Susan Craig – Tell Me it is Enough

Danielle Ann Verwers – When the Lights Go Out

Ann-Chadwell Humphries – Golden Boy

Austin Hehir – Human

Libby Bernardin – Dear October

Horace Mungin – Flip of the Two-Headed Coin

Melanie McClellan Hartnett – untitled

Al Black – Prayers in the Spectrum

John Lane – Two Rifts on Montale

Gil Allen – The Chosen

Jane Zenger – What I Will Do For You

Lisa Johnson-McVety – Sad Feet

The Play Right Series, Community Producers, and Sharks and Other Lovers -- a message from cindi

When we started the Jasper Project last year as a non-profit entity dedicated to collaborative arts engineering, one of the first projects on our roster, after putting out the next issue of Jasper Magazine, was the formation of the Play Right Series.

The Play Right Series is an endeavor to enlighten and empower audiences with information about the process involved in creating theatrical arts, at the same time that we engineer and increase opportunities for SC theatre artists to create and perform new works for theatre. The word process is italicized because one of the four main missions* of the Jasper Project is to pull back the curtain on what, for most of us, is the magic and mystery of art. The Process.

How, for example, does a play get from a nugget in the playwright’s brain through her pen and all the way through re-writes, communication with directors, casting, table readings, stage readings, blocking, costuming, lighting, scoring, marketing, financing, rehearsal after rehearsal after rehearsal, and so much more, all the way to the stage on opening night?

We believe not only that the process of creating art deserves the same kind of accolades and wonder that the product does, but that knowledge of the process makes us both better audiences and patrons, as well as better artists ourselves. One of the ways we implement this belief is by involving Community Producers.

Community Producers are normal people, just like you and me, who invest a modest but meaningful amount of money in the production of one of the Play Right Series plays. In exchange for their investment, Community Producers are offered an insiders’ view of what goes on behind the scenes and are invited to follow the process of producing a new play from the first readings on.

The first in our line-up of new, audience-friendly plays is Sharks and Other Lovers, written by Columbia native Randall David Cook, and our first class of Community Producers is made up of Bonnie Goldberg, Roe Young, Bill Schmidt, Marcia Stine, Charles and Jean Cook, and Jack Oliver.

Larry Hembree is the director of the play and he believes strongly that this program is important for the Greater Columbia Arts Community at this point in time. “In a city that prides its arts and culture scene, the Play Right Series validates the performing arts’ work here and is a testament to artists and audiences that new work can be created and supported,” he says. “The long term goals [of the Play Right Series] are to continue to keep our city and state at the forefront of theatre by continuing to produce as much new work as possible.  Trustus has done a stellar job at this for over 30 years. So has the Columbia Children’s Theatre with its Commedia productions for young audiences.   Now the Jasper Project can continue to grow that. It’s exciting. Because this process is a true collaboration between playwright, director, actors and designers. It can only work if there is true collaboration among all the artists involved which certainly improves theatre skills for all of them.”

Sharks and Other Lovers stars Libby Campbell, Jennifer Moody Sanchez, Josh Kern, Glenn Rawls, and Perry Simpson. David Swicegood does costume and hair, Barry Wheeler is the sound designer, and Emily Harrill is the stage designer.

Because of the support of Bonnie, Roe, Bill, Marcia, Charles, Jean, and Jack, the Jasper Project is delighted to present a staged reading of Sharks and Other Lovers on Friday, April 28th and Saturday, May 6th. Both readings will take place at Tapp’s Arts Center and the cost is only $10. There will be a cash bar and an exciting discussion of the journey the play has taken thus far, and where it will go from here.

I hope you’ll join us for the first in an on-going series of experiments in theatre arts. It’ll be fun, and we’ll all be better theatre audiences (and hopefully artists) for having been there.

Take care,

Cindi

*The Jasper Project is committed to four integrated criteria:

• Process – illuminating the unique processes endemic to all art forms in order to provide a greater level of understanding and respect for that discipline.

• Community/Collaboration – nurturing community both within and between arts disciplines.

• Narrative – creating a more positive and progressive understanding of SC culture.

• Economy – being efficient stewards of arts funding committed to creating more with less. 

Donate

5 Playwrights - 5 Directors - 5 Casts of 4 Actors -- 1 Night Only with FEST 24!

FEST 24: 5 playwrights, 5 directors, and 20 actors create and perform 5 new 10-minute plays in 24 hours. Always entertaining, always a whirlwind - and not to be missed! You'll truly have a unique experience at this one-night only performance!

This is how it works --

• 7 pm - Saturday evening (August 23rd):  5 directors show up at Trustus Theatre and pick (from a hat, we can only assume) one of 5 playwrights and 5 casts of 4 actors. A matter of minutes later, the playwrights (not all currently in SC, but all with ties to SC) each receive an email with instructions that they have until 7 am Sunday morning to create an original, 10 minute play that includes 1 specific prop and 1 specific line of dialogue, (which will be announced to the public just before 8 pm on Saturday evening.)

• Night falls, playwrights write, actors and directors sleep - restlessly.

• 7:30 am Sunday morning (August 24th): directors and casts show up once again and meet with artistic/criminal mastermind Chad Henderson who delivers unto them brand new, never performed plays, fresh from the printer and the exhausted imaginations of the now sleeping playwrights.

• 8 am until 7:59 pm Sunday -- directors and casts rehearse tirelessly

• 8 pm Sunday -- YOU show up to Trustus theatre (there are a few seats left, but not many) as the 5 brand new world premiere plays are performed to witness the kind of innovative, cutting edge theatre arts Columbia can now get accustomed to.

BOOM!

This is how we do it now.

~~~

Introducing the actors:

and the directors:

And the playwrights:

A resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2007, Sarah's plays are Green Girl, The Extinction of Felix Garden, Circus Tracks, Kudzu, and House on Stilts. Honors include the Lippmann Family “New Frontier” Award, Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Award, commissions from South Coast Repertory and Broadway Across America, and a residency at The Royal National Theatre in London. String, her musical with Adam Gwon, won the Frederick Loewe Award at New Dramatists, a NAMT residency grant, the Weston Playhouse New Musicals Award, and was chosen for the Eugene O'Neill National Music Theatre Conference. Her plays have been produced at the Summer Play Festival at The Public, Trustus Theatre, Hangar Lab, City Theatre Summer Shorts, Live Girls! Theater, Collaboraction, Tulsa New Works for Women, and several universities. Her short plays are published in Ten-Minute Plays for 2 Actors: The Best of 2004 (Smith and Kraus) and Great Short Plays: Volume 6 (Playscripts, Inc.).

A New York-based playwright who originally hails from South Carolina. In recent years he's had two plays premiere Off-Broadway: in 2007, Fate's Imagination opened at the Players Theatre (Entertaining...Tasty plot twists and some very funny lines, The New York Times), and in 2006 Sake with the Haiku Geisha opened at the Perry Street Theatre (Witty, Observant, The New York Times) and was chosen as one of Backstage magazine's Picks of the Week. His one-act play Sushi and Scones was broadcast by the BBC, and his two screenplays (Quintet and Revelation) were both finalists for the Sundance Filmmakers Lab. He is the Resident Playwright of Gotham Stage Company, the writer of the annual Fred and Adele Astaire Awards (for best of dance on Broadway and in film) and an active member of the Dramatists Guild.

A playwright, screenwriter and a graduate of the University of South Carolina and UCLA’s professional screenwriting program. Robbie’s first play, Mina Tonight!, was published by Samuel French Inc. and has been produced in regional theatres across the nation. He is also the writer/director of the musical theatrical production, The Twitty Triplets, which has been produced at Trustus and other local venues over the last two decades years (and set to return in 2015). Robbie’s screenplays have placed in several national contests, and his latest, Sweet Child of Mine, was named one of the top 12 comedy scripts in the Austin Film Festival’s Screenwriting Competition. Last year in NYC, Robertson staged a sold out run of his staged adaptation of the film Satan in High Heels, a work that received its first staged reading at Trustus. In 2013, he was awarded the SC Arts Commission Fellowship in Screenwriting. Robbie thanks Larry Hembree and Chad Henderson for their sincere interest and courage in mounting new works.

An emerging playwright, Dean was selected as a Kennedy Center / ACTF Core Member Apprentice at the Playwrights’ Center (Minneapolis, MN) for the 2010 / 2011 season. His plays include: THE MORE BEYOND (developed with Playwrights' Center, Kennedy Center, The Puzzle Festival NYC, The Flea, Semi-Finalist for the 2011 Princess Grace Award), BELLHAMMER, a modern allegory set in the world of Christian Professional Wrestling (developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Semi-Finalist for the O'Neill Theatre Conference), the full-length drama PARADISE KEY (Winner of the 2010 Trustus Theatre Playwrights' Festival, produced at Arena Players Repertory Theatre in NY, Trustus Theatre, Hyde Park Theatre), the Zombie-thriller H apocalyptus (produced by The Salvage Company at the Cairns Festival, Queensland Australia, and at Piccolo Spoleto Festival, developed at The Garage Theatre in San Francisco, and in residency at The Studios of Key West), the full-length drama, LOSING SLEEP (Winner of the 2008 Helford Prize in Drama, and produced Off-Off Broadway at the American Theatre of Actors), and the full-length, two-person comedy, COMPANY TIME (developed under luxurious circumstances at the Players Theatre, NYC.)Dean's screenplay SALK, the true story of the discovery of the vaccine against Polio, won the 2009 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation student screenplay award. Dean graduated from WheatonCollege, Wheaton, IL, with degrees in Philosophy and Communications, and received his MFA in Dramatic Writing at CarnegieMellonUniversity where he was a two-time recipient of the Shubert Foundation Fellowship. He is a Principle Artist with The Salvage Company (NYC), and a proud member the Playwrights’ Center and the Dramatists Guild of America.

Downey has written plays before and he hopes the knowledge of that makes you feel like the two hundred bucks you're shelling out for a celebrity impersonator to join you at the "legitimate theater" tonight isn't going to waste. The important thing to remember is that Mike is getting out there and is no longer aware of his grotesque limitations. Mr. Downey (Janet if you're nasty) likes huffing gin, shouting at cars, and collecting wall hangings that have printings of that footprint dealie about Jesus. He's six foot one inch tall and would love to talk about the 1984 film "2010: The Year We Make Contact" with you over tea and Bavarian sage rugelach. His wife and children tolerate his frequent Finish Jenkka dancing…barely.

Review -- Third Finger, Left Hand

Randall David Cook's clever, funny, and comfortably bizarre play, Third Finger, Left Hand, is a production that could benefit from the addition of both time and space. A portion of the Jasper entourage had the opportunity to attend a late night show on Friday, for the next-to-the-last-performance of the play's Columbia run, as we snuggled into the intimate confines of the Trustus Black Box Theatre along with a few dozen of our closest friends. An efficient configuration of the seating in the black box area created something of a theatre-in-the-round arrangement and, as is the way with small space productions, we all became a part of the show.

With a cast of five strong women and one delightful man, (Joe Hudson plays the part of Mark Luke Matthews, a church organist with a penchant for sound effects), the play catapulted the audience into the overlapping conjunctions of sad but hysterical drama from the first word. In the part of a sappily sweet-mouthed wedding planner, Dell Goodrich embodied the socially constructed worst of Southern womanhood as she contrived and manipulated, and said one thing but meant another, all from a plastered smile evoking images of the proverbial serpent in the garden itself. While it is disturbing to see this stereotype perpetuated in the theatre, the reality is that those bitches are still out there and maybe the best way to rid the world of them is to expose their likes on the stage for all to see. Sumner Bender, Kristin Wood Cobb, Ellen Rodillo-Fowler, and Denise Pearman, under the direction of Larry Hembree, fashioned a well-balanced ensemble cast that fed off one another like a dysfunctional and somewhat sapphic sorority.

The 75 minutes of Third Finger, Left Hand were filled with all the laughter and cringes appropriate to a modern-day gothic tale of the worst of humanity dressed up all pretty in the guise of family lore, but we couldn't leave the theatre without feeling as if the play itself needed something more -- the luxury of time and space. While we enjoyed the intimacy of the black box setting, Third Finger, Left Hand is the kind of play that really needs to spread out and take off its Spanx. We would like not only to see the play on a larger stage with a less minimalist set, but also in two extended acts. Several of the most important components to the creepiness of the conflict were delivered to the audience like a slap on the face, but with the economy of the forward motion of the play, we were given little time to process them. A few extra moments for both the actors and the audience to catch our collective breath -- and realize how disgusted we really were -- would have been helpful and much appreciated.

That said, thanks to Randall David Cook for bringing  his special kind of crazy back home to South Carolina. We like it when successful people don't forget where they came from. And we like it even better when they come back. You have one more night to see this engaging play. Do it. Then call, facebook, or email Randall David Cook and ask him to bring it back to us again -- same cast, same director -- but this time on the main stage.

For Your Consideration -- Jasper's take on three plays opening in Columbia this week

Jasper loves going to the theatre. On rare occasions, he'll just show up and be surprised by what he gets. But most of the time, he does his homework. There are three shows opening in the city this week. One you should just show up for and have a good time. One you might want to do a little planning for. And another that you need to know what you're getting into so, you know, you can really get into it. Anything Goes, opening at Workshop Theatre on Friday night and running through October 1st, is like an ice cream sundae. You really just have to go for it. Other than knowing it's Cole Porter and how, like ice cream and chocolate syrup, it's brilliant in its simplicity, you don't need to over-analyze it. Just have fun. And, given that Cindy Flach is directing it, yeah, you will have fun. Flach has a way, not only with execution, but with space. Her shows conjure up words like pizzazz, and sizzle, and flare. She's another one of Columbia's treasures who asks for little attention, but always gets the job done and gets it done well.

On Wednesday night, in some wild configuration of the Trustus Black Box and Late Night series, our boy Larry Hembree opens Randall David Cook's play, Third Finger, Left Hand. The show plays Wednesday nights at 7:30 and Friday and Saturday nights at 11, for two weeks. Cook is a hometown boy who has done well so, in our book, that would be reason enough to go out and support this show with your patronage. But there's more -- well, first of all, you know Larry Hembree and the kind of weird and magical spells he tends to put on a stage, so, there's that. But the bottom line is that the play has been described as both "Southern gothic" and "twisted" -- terms that makes Jasper's pulse absolutely race. (Jasper likes weird -- why hide it?) But here's the thing -- Cook and Hembree are also presenting a little bonus, next Tuesday the 20th, when they give a staged reading of another little something from Cook's box of tricks, a play called Southern Discomfort. In an effort to construct something of a study of Cook's work, we'll be seeing both the reading and the play next week. Then we're going to sit down and decide what we really think of Cook's work and talk about it. We invite our lovely readers to join us in this online discussion next week. Come back here -- right here -- and share your comments below. We look forward to getting your views.

Finally, a third play opens this week that already has us wiggling in our seats. We've never seen David Mamet's Oleanna, but we've seen David Mamet's Race (with David Spade) and his Glengarry, Glen Ross (with Alan Alda), and we've seen his films, Wag the Dog, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, to name just a few. So we know that when David Mamet writes for us, we have to prepare ourselves to be receptive. Mamet's use of language and delivery (called "Mamet speak") is unique and edgy and a little scary. Rather than enjoying a little vino or a draught of bourbon before a Mamet play, we recommend you dose up on caffeine -- not to help you stay awake, but rather to help you keep up. Mamet is unrelenting. That said, the subject of Oleanna is sexual harassment in the academy. A subject far too serious to trivialize or present solely for entertainment value. Mamet doesn't - it will be interesting to see what director, Ait Federolf, a senior in the department of theatre at USC, does with his production. It opens at the USC Lab Theatre on Thursday night, the 15th -- but you'll be busy then attending the Jasper Magazine Launch Party at Speakeasy -- and only runs until the 18th. All shows are at 8 pm and cost $5 -- with tickets available only at the door.

For more information on all three plays, visit the following websites or addresses  respectively:

Anything Goes - workshoptheatre.com/11-12season_AnythingGoes.html

Third Finger, Left Hand - Trustus.org

Oleanna - bushk@mailbox.sc.edu

Jasper Magazine - The Word on Columbia Arts

debuts in print form in 4 days!

until then, please visit us at www.jaspercolumbia.com

and on Facebook -- please give us a "like"

Thanks!