Echo Reads is a Free Theater Experience. Directors lightly rehearse readings of plays with professional actors who carry their scripts as they perform for the audience. After the Zoom reading, the audience is invited to stay and discuss the play with the Actors, Director, and Echo Creatives in a casual conversation online. 

Everyone is invited!

BRIGHT HALF

LIFE by

tANYA BARFIELD

DIRECTED BY CAROLINE HAMILTON

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Friday, June 18 at 8pm
Saturday, June 19 at 8pm

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Bright Half Life follows Erica and Vicki through the ups and downs of their relationship over the course of 1985-2031. Scenes are told a-chronologically, hopping between multiple points in their life within each scene. The play is a moving love story that spans decades in an instant: marriage, children, skydiving, and the infinite moments that make a life together. Tanya Barfield's play Blue Door was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize Nominee.

CATCH AS

CATCH CAN

by MIA CHUNG

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DIRECTED BY TIM JOHNSON

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Friday, July 23rd at 8pm   
Saturday, July 24th at 8pm

Long-time neighbors Theresa Phelan and Roberta Lavecchia enjoy sharing a plate of rainbow cookies and piles of family gossip. Theresa’s son Tim, the family golden boy, is back in town and newly engaged to a Korean-American woman. Roberta’s son, Robbie, lives at home and is smarting from a divorce. Her daughter, Daniela, is waiting for her boyfriend to propose. This is what the mothers believe, because these are the roles and tropes they recognize. They are almost entirely wrong. 

Two blue collar New England families grapple with a spiraling crisis that threatens not just their relationships, but their very identities. Three actors take on the six roles, crossing both generation and gender, upending the kitchen sink drama in a theatrical tour-de-force.

THERE IS EVIL IN THIS HOUSE by

Natalie Nicole Dressel

DIRECTOR tba

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Friday, October 22nd at 8pm
Saturday, October 23rd at 8pm

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This play was written as a biography by Natalie Nicole Dressel, an actress/playwright from Muskegon, Michigan. The coming of age story follows a trans-woman as she unwinds the many twisted threads of her life:  her mother is manic, her new step-dad is a con-man, and the ghost of her dead father won’t stop re-arranging the furniture. The play weaves therapy, horror, Hamlet, and late-night talk shows together into a meta-theatrical examination of Penny’s continually evolving relationship with her mother and how the past can—quite literally—haunt you.

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Eugene O'Neill National Playwright Conference, Finalist (2019)

Bourbon at the border by

pearl cleage

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DIRECTED BY mikaela brooks

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Friday, November 19th at 8pm
Saturday, November 20th at 8pm

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When May and Charlie went to Mississippi in 1964 for a massive voter registration drive, they had no idea their lives were about to change forever.  White supremacists responded with violence that left three civil rights workers dead and many more psychologically scarred. Decades later, May and Charlie are still searching for a way back from the damage that was done to them during that long ago “Freedom Summer.” 

May is unable to confide even in her best friend, Rosa, about the demons that haunt her dreams and twist Charlie’s love for her into something she can no longer recognize.  Rosa’s boyfriend, Tyrone, gets Charlie a job as a truck driver, but May is convinced that if she can just get Charlie to leave Detroit and cross the bridge to Canada, they can start a new life. But when the two couples hear about a serial killer targeting white people in Detroit, the madness of that summer bubbles over until it threatens all of their very lives. 

in a

word by

lauren yee

DIRECTED BY eric berg

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Friday, December 10th at 8pm
Saturday, December 11th at 8pm

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Fiona has a nagging feeling that she’s missing something. Today is Fiona’s birthday and the two-year anniversary of her son’s disappearance, and still, nothing makes sense to her: not the incompetent detective, her “understanding” boss, or the neighborhood kidnapper who keeps casually introducing himself at the grocery store.  Her husband, Guy, is desperately trying to move on, but Fiona delves back into her memories of that fateful day, struggling to find the right words to bring her son home.

A comedy about grief and how the words we use to describe tragedy can take on a life of their own.
NYT Critic’s Pick - Best New Play (2017)
Frencesa Primus Prize (2017)

THE GREAT LONELY ROAMER & THE NIGHT THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING by CQ

(Christina Quintana)

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DIRECTed by vickie washington

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Friday, May 21 at 8pm
Saturday, May 22 at 8pm

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Only two polar bears are left on the planet. On New Year’s Eve, one bear searches suburban Texas for a new, air-conditioned home, while his sister attempts to track him down in New York City. A gun-toting trucker tries to race his pregnant wife to the hospital. A first date laced with supercharged marijuana takes a turn at a police stop. A wild night ensues that will affect the future of an entire species. Christina Quintana (AKA: CQ) is a queer, cross-genre writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots.

Production Team

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Producer                                                     Eric Berg

Producer                                       Caroline Hamilton

Managing and Artistic Director                Kateri Cale

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Our Official Echo Reads Cookie Sponsor will

Bring the YUMM! when we can meet (and eat) again:

funded, in part, by: