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makers making meaning
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Playwrights Nelle Tankus and Asha Dore review Parley's world premiere virtual workshop of Nelle's play, Yom Kippur! If you haven't seen Yom Kippur yet, it's available to stream for free on our homepage and our YouTube channel. Yom Kippur was written by Nelle Tankus, directed by Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth, and featured original visual art by Carol Y Lee and Asha Dore. This world premiere had two live virtual performances in November of 2022. Review compiled and edited by Asha Dore. Produced by Parley || Make plays, not war.
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Playwrights Asha Dore and drew david combs discuss Parley's short play festival, Dirty Beasts, and each of 7 participating festival playwrights reviews their own work. Dirty Beasts: rough plays in early development featuring new work by Katherine Jett, Dustin Hageland, drew david combs, n8 Heneghan, Carolynne Wilcox, Asha Dore, and Carol Y Lee. Featuring acting by: Katherine Jett, Denny Le, drew david combs, Fernando Cavallo, Isis King, Ana Maria Campoy, Viviana Garza, and Carol Y Lee. Directed by Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth Performed at West of Lenin, Seattle, October 21-22, 2022 Review compiled and edited by Asha Dore. Produced by Parley || Make plays, not war. Here's one who sings and plays a 2-stringed guitar:  Parley playwrights (and friends!) read from the 70+ written audience responses to our prompt, during the Bacchic Rites of Cowboys With Questions: "Describe your perfect community." With deep gratitude to the audiences who joined us between Aug 31 and September 3, 2022. Edited and mixed by Associate Artist Brandon Tourino Collinsworth. Photos by Mark Gladding Visual art by Asha Dore Video by Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth Our inaugural totally biased review of our own work. Rebecca and Asha discuss ...
Cowboys With Questions, Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth’s most recent play, dramatizes a conflict between a cult leader, his harem of women, and a wealthy rancher. Tourino Collinsworth engages a familiar battle of the sexes here, but her given circumstances come as a relief: these women are smart. Cowboys With Questions is the fifth play in a tour de force string of plays in the last decade that also explore what women can do when they are fully human. Tourino Collinsworth’s work ranges widely in subject, setting, and tone—a family clinic that predicts a child’s impact on a marriage; a content single mom confronted with the belated return of her spouse; a midwife who helps a pregnant teen to escape prison (to say nothing of talking her through a self-cervical exam); and two Latin American kids orphaned by war who try to find their father—but the backbone is always a study in what the world would be like if women had more room to move. This is even true of her 2005 play, Quickening, centered on five pregnant women, which she wrote partially out of frustration over the lack of roles for women in professional theater. In life, as in art, the obstacles to women’s action are legion. With Cowboys, she has again imagined five killer female roles, and two of the remaining three men wear false eyelashes. Cowboys, like her other plays, is plotted with discipline, a clean puzzle in which every Chekhovian gun that appears is fired. On top of this, her language is precision-tooled for effect, from the vernacular, to Spanish, to the poetry of the commenting chorus. Phrases, like guns, appear, and reappear in other hands, multiplying their dramatic power. An attentive audience is rewarded with many moments of warmth, insight, schadenfreude, and humor. Here we get a gripping story about sex and drugs, but also food for those who crave beautiful language. All this is accomplished in 80 minutes; and this cast and production gives and gives, not only with lighting and costumes and sound, but even with an artist that creates theater magic by continuing to flesh out the landscape on stage in real time. No smoke and mirrors. Just lots of talented people working hard together. Only Parley could put up a fisherman’s net on a shoestring.
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