Veterans Repertory Theater will present an industry reading of Deborah Yarchun's new play the calm before. Jessica Blank (Coal Country, The Exonerated) will direct the reading at Ripley-Grier Studios January 23 at 5 PM.
Krysta Rodriguez (The Collaboration, Into the Woods) and Michael Gaston (Lucky Guy) will star.
Set in Texas on the brink of a massive hurricane making landfall, the calm before follows Ellen as she goes to retrieve her father Mitch, who plans to ride out the storm. But as the winds rise, so does the tension between the two.
Yarchun said in an earlier statement, “As Hurricane Harvey approached Texas, I was in Austin and struck by the eerie calm that precedes a storm. The calm before brings together several areas that fascinate me: why people refuse to evacuate during natural disasters, families with landmines of political differences (particularly in these divisive times), and what it means when a parent-child dynamic flips and a parent refuses to relinquish control. At its heart, the play explores a fraught father-daughter relationship full of love and complexities."
Veterans Repertory Theater is producing.