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'Mad Girl's Love Song' by Sugar '08 to Be Presented Oct. 4-6

For Immediate Release: September 28, 2007
Contact: Marsha Nishi Mullan
610-328-8535
http://www.swarthmore.edu/news

 'Mad Girl's Love Song' by Rachel Sugar '08
to Be Presented at Swarthmore Oct. 4-6

"Mad Girl's Love Song," an original production conceived, written, and performed by senior Swarthmore Honors theater student Rachel Sugar and directed by Kym Moore, visiting assistant professor of theater, will be presented at Swarthmore College Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 4-6, at 8 p.m. in the Frear Ensemble Theatre, Lang Performing Arts Center. The performances are free and open to the public.

"Love Song" asks: what happens when the boundary between life and art dissolves? "Dying is an art/ Like everything else," wrote poet Sylvia Plath. Using the art they made from their lives and the lives they drew from their art, "Mad Girl's Love Song" takes us to the house where Plath, her husband Ted Hughes, and his mistress, Assia Wevill, became inexorably tangled together. As the three grow haunted by the ghosts of each other and their pasts, "Love Song" asks what it means to be a woman and an artist.

In the summer of 2007, Moore and Sugar began collaborating on what has become "Love Song." Armed with a vision for a piece that grappled with Sylvia Plath's and Assia Wevill's quests for identity and creativity, Moore and Sugar began to generate material using Anne Bogart's Viewpoints and the writings of Plath, Hughes, Wevill, and their biographers. In its current incarnation, the script of "Love Song" is a collage of original and found texts, shaped into a single story.

Rachel Sugar is a senior Theater major with minors in English Literature and Interpretation Theory. At Swarthmore, she has appeared in assorted performance projects including collective creations "Things You Shouldn't Discuss," "Hans Lied," and "Serata Futurista," as well as "The Bacchai," "Days and Nights Within," and "Spring Awakening" and as a member of the improv comedy group Vertigo-go. Beyond Swarthmore, she has trained at the Moscow Art Theater, Shakespeare & Company, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and the Detroit Second City. She spent the summer of 2006 working as a dramaturg at Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage.

Kym Moore comes to Swarthmore after directing plays off-Broadway and in regional theaters including Penumbra Theatre, HereArts Center, The Women's Project, Boston Center for the Arts, Urban Stages, CAP 21, and Stage West. As founding director of the Frogs on the Water Theater in New Mexico, she produced and directed new works by solo performers Le Thi Diem Thuy, Collin Chase, and Janice Simmons. She has been nominated for the Alan Schneider Directing Award by the Theatre Communications Group and is the winner of the 2003 Pen and Brush Award for her one-act play, "The Date," which is published in the African American Review. Moore earned her M.F.A. in directing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and currently teaches acting and directing in the Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film at SUNY Purchase College. She is an associate member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

For more information about the performances, please call 610-328-8260 or email lclark1@swarthmore.edu.