THE SECOND MOUSE by Rita Anderson
Sunday, March 26 at 6:30 PM
Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St.
Mitch has a broken play. Julia has writing experience. They trade favors and work together, but soon ideas, relationships, and boundaries blur until there’s no telling where reality ends and fiction begins. A literary thriller about seduction in a play within a play within a play.
When the concept of “ownership” is in crisis, what does it mean to “belong”? Where do ideas come from? and Who “owns” them?
Rita Anderson has an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Playwriting, and she served as Dramatists Guild Regional Representative and as Faculty for Interlochen. She went on scholarship to The O’Neill, and Frantic is the Carousel won a National Partners of American Theatre nomination. Rita won the Ken Ludwig Playwriting Award, the top national prize from The Kennedy Center for “Best Body of Work,” and she has had 100 productions and literary publications including Smith & Kraus’s BEST NEW TEN-MINUTE PLAYS, BEST WOMEN’S MONOLOGUES (both anthologies in 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023), and in BEST MEN’S MONOLOGUES (2022, 2023). Early Liberty, Final Conversations, The 27 Club, Woman Hollering Creek, and Saint Somebody are “Best Selling Plays,” and Rita is in She Persisted: Thirty New Ten-Minute Plays by Women 40+. (Introduction, Theresa Rebeck. Applause Books.) Rita was Playwright in Residence at Lakeview Performing Arts Center, and she has developed work with Axial Theatre, The 24-Hour Plays Project, Madison New Works Laboratory, Woven Theatre & The Loom New Works Festival, HBMG Foundation & Creede Repertory Theatre, The PlayGround Experiment, Texas State University, Missouri State University, James Madison University, Illinois College, Reading Theater Project, The Barrow Group, Mildred’s Umbrella Museum of Dysfunction, and Rita was a pilot playwright for Hyde Park Theatre Writers’ Group, but the highlight of her emerging career so far was sitting on a playwriting panel with Christopher Durang—and sharing a playbill with Caridad Svich. Rita is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee for her books: The Entropy of Rocketman, and Watched Pots (A Lovesong to Motherhood), and she is a Moderator for HONOR ROLL!, an advocacy group for women+ playwrights 40+ whose goal is our equal representation in theatre.