A World Premiere production of Sister of Mine by Kate McGunagle
Directed by Jonathan V. Edmondson
Assistant Directed by Caitlin Alvarez
Honorary Producer: Lauren Hughes
Featuring:
A – Eliza Waterman
Z – MJ Santry
Wednesday, October 25 – Sunday, October 29, 2023, at the Community Education Center (3500 Lancaster Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19104). Sister of Mine runs approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.
About the Play: A and Z, former childhood friends recovering from compulsory heterosexuality, imagine a series of encounters in which they unexpectedly reunite after substantial time apart, exposing longings, secrets, and betrayals. A love letter to the intricacy of first queer friendship, Sister of Mine is a meditation on the queer experience of searching for an identity within a world that both imposes and resists categorization.
About the Playwright: A queer writer and artist from rural Montana, Kate is deeply interested in stories that wrestle with the seemingly impossible – those that examine queer bodies, experience, and pleasure, interrogate rape culture and gendered violence, and revel in the spaces between social categories and within ordinary life. Her first play M, developed through the Tennessee Playwrights Studio fellowship program in 2022, examines what it is to document a queer woman’s life and longings, on the page and on the screen. Sister of Mine will be her first formally produced piece.
Kate holds a B.A. in English from Princeton University and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University, and her short fiction and personal essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Whitefish Review, Five Points, Passages North, and The North American Review; her essay “Passive Voice,” which examines the language of rape, was the recipient of the 2021 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction and named a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2022. She is an active collaborator within The Pipeline Collective, which first led her to playwriting, and author behind the playful Substack Bardette, which examines daily queer encounters.
About The Strides Collective: Founded in 2020, The Strides Collective is a nonprofit queer theatre company in Philadelphia that produces and develops theatrical work by emerging playwrights that embraces the queer experience through authentic, modern, and innovative storytelling. To learn more, visit our website at stridescollective.com