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New Play Reading
A Smart Girl's Guide to Risk and Returns
by Victoria Stewart
(Recipient of Tennessee Rep’s 2008/2009 Martha R. Ingram Artist-in-Residence: New Work for the Theatre Fellowship.)
When Claudine meets Henry, a starving artist, she falls head over heels. Her mother, a financial guru, has her doubts. Is Henry everything her daughter has been looking for? Or is he after only one thing? A modern day adaptation of Henry James’ Washington Square, A Smart Girl’s Guide to Risk and Returns is about women and their relationship to men, mothers and money, in that order.
Artist in Residence
Tennessee Repertory Theatre has been gifted with funds to create an artist-in-residence program for new work. Each season we will support a selected playwright’s efforts to write the new play that he or she have been dying to write. This season playwright Victoria Stewart is the recipient of Tennessee Rep’s 2008/2009 Martha R. Ingram Artist-in-Residence: New Work for the Theatre Fellowship.
Tennessee Rep in partnership with Vanderbilt’s Department of Theatre will present a reading of Victoria’s new play A Smart Girl’s Guide to Risk and Returns on June 11, 12, and 13, 2009. The reading will be held in Neely Auditorium on Vanderbilt’s campus. Actors participating in the reading are Jamie Farmer, Wesley Paine, Patrick Waller, and Martha Wilkinson.
Victoria Stewart
Before graduating from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, Victoria Stewart was a professional stage- manager, working with David Rabe, Anne Bogart, and Peter Sellars among others. Her play Hardball was named a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and she has received the Francesca Primus Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, Ucross/Sundance, Donmar Warehouse and Hedgebrook residencies, the Norman Felton fellowship, as well as the Jerome Fellowship. Victoria is the 2008–09 recipient of a McKnight Advancement Grant at the Playwrights’ Center. Her work has been performed and developed at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, South Coast Rep, SPF, Seattle Repertory Theater, Urban Stages, Live Girls Productions, Stage Left, Hourglass Group, Circle X, Vineyard Theatre, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Jungle Theater, Commonwealth Theater Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Page 73, Overlap Productions, and the Guthrie Theater. She is a member of the Workhaus Collective and the Vinegar Tom Players.