“LEGAL TENDER”
by Elizabeth Bruce & Robert Michael Oliver
at the Capital Fringe Festival
“Miguelito’s Journey”
By Edelmira Núñez and Elizabeth Bruce commissioned and performed at Adventure Theatre
Miguelito’s Journey: A Bilingual Play for Youth Audiences
Elizabeth Bruce and Mimi Nuñez were commissioned by Adventure Theatre to write a bilingual play about the acculturation of Hispanic youth coming to the United States to be reunited with their parents, sometimes years after they’d been left with relatives while their parents came to this country to make a new life. “Miguelito’s Journey” was so true to their experiences that audience members from the Hispanic community, and others who were from different cultures, were weeping during performances.
Carol Leahy
Former President & Artistic Director, Adventure Theatre
“Sheila’s Iron”
by Elizabeth Bruce
Winner Carpetbag Theatre’s W.F. Lucas Playwright Competition
“The Exile and the American”
By Elizabeth Bruce, Staged Readings by Playwrights’ Forum at Howard University
“Wise Woman”
by Robert Michael Oliver and Elizabeth Bruce,
Commissioned by the Washington Ethical Society
(inspired by The Lost Princess by George Macdonald)
“When my acting students and I looked at objectives and the importance of choosing specific meaningful verbs that resonated with them, I used my experience from the Wise Woman project with Sanctuary Theatre. Director Michael Oliver guided a process to discover and embody an active verb as the spine of the character, a verb that captured the essence of the character’s physical, vocal and emotional life. We then found a physical action to express the verb.
I was playing Rosamond (the Lost Princess in the original text used as inspiration). She was starved of love and would do anything to get attention. She was like a bulimic with food who would gorge and purge, only she did it with people. There was no single verb that described that action, so I made one up: to bulimiate. As I write this I still find--over 30 years later--that my fingers and toes begin to move and, if I allow it, my belly and shoulders and back begin to join in the “bulimiate dance” until Rosamond is awakened from her hibernation in the cells and muscles of my body. This is what happens as I tell the story to my students and they see me physically evolve as I conjure the bulimiate dance before them. They see that they have the freedom to imagine and create what works for them and not be limited by a dictionary or any other boundary they encounter.”
Laurie Mufson, MFA
Retired Director of Theatre, Palmer Chair in the Fine Arts Mercersburg Academy