writing is live
Bathhouse.ppt by Jesús I. Valles Directed by Andrew Watring ’23 MFA Staged Reading: Saturday, April 30, 11AM Sunday, May 1, 6PM Fishman Studio, Granoff Center 154 Angell Street, Providence RI 02906 CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS This play is a group project for perverts. Somewhere between lecture, re-enactment, and cruising ground, an informative presentation on the history of showers & bathing starts to burst at the seams with the ghosts of a bathhouse at the end of the world.
Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, storyteller, and performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. Jesús is a 2021 CantoMundo fellowship recipient at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, a 2019 Lambda Literary fellow, a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Playwriting Fellow of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a recipient of the 2019 Letras Latinas Scholarship from the Community of Writers’ Poetry Workshop, and a poetry fellow at Idyllwild Arts Writers Week. Jesús is also a 2018 Undocupoets Fellow, a 2018 Tin House Scholar, a fellow of The 2018 Poetry Incubator, and the runner-up in the 2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their work has been published in The Shade Journal, The Texas Review, The New Republic, Palabritas, The Acentos Review, Quarterly West, The Mississippi Review, Palette, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, The McNeese Review, and PANK. Their poetry has also been featured on NPR’s Code Switch, The Slowdown, The BreakBeat Poets’ LatiNext Anthology, and the Best New Poets 2020 anthology. As an actor, they are the recipient of four B. Iden Payne Awards, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama (2018), and Outstanding Original Script (2018) and they were nominated for the Mark David Cohen New Play Award for their play, (Un)Documents. They most recently starred as Penny Marshall in Victor I. Cazares’ Pinching Pennies with Penny Marshall: Death Rituals for Penny Marshall for New York Theatre Workshop. Jesús is currently OUTSider festival’s OUTsider-in-residence and an MFA playwriting student at Brown University
Andrew Watring (Andrew) is a Black trans Object-theatre-creator, director, award-winning playwright, producer, performer, and Anarkata-in-training from sweet home Huntsville, Alabama. Andrew's career has been dedicated to the creation and continued cultivation of Shakespeare is a White Supremacist, a thearical ritual grounded in Shakespeare’s colonizing effect on the American theatre; most recently staged with Main Street Players (Miami-Dade, FL). Select directing credits include: The Henriad, Richard III, White Noise, Hamletmachine, Passing: A Stage Play, Coriolanus. Andrew was a member of the Directors Lab North (2021); graduate of the Theatre Lab Life Stories Institutie (2019); an Honored Playwright at the New South Young Playwright’s Festival. Andrew founded and served as the Artistic Director of the Fractal Theatre Collective, an anti-capitalist arts organization that embraced community-led, direct action as an integral element of theatrical design. Andrew’s projects currently in development: Black. Queer. Providence; The Brilliant Failed Kidnapping of Edgar Allen Poe to Incite Black Revolution in Baltimore in 1849; or The Slave Play; The Decathexis Cycle. Andrew holds a BA in Theatre from American University, and is an MFA candidate at Brown University / Trinity Repertory Company. https://www.andrewwatring.com/