June 22, 2022

In our final Evening Reads of the season, Polly MacIntyre performs this monologue as a quiet, middle-aged iconoclast in Bed Among the Lentils, a play featuring interrogations of faith, Christianity and the institution of marriage.

The play was originally broadcast as part of the BBC’s “Talking Heads” series in 1987, with Dame Maggie Smith in the role. MacIntyre portrays Susan, a vicar’s wife who is painfully aware of her derailed life and marriage, having glimpsed a more vital alternative existence.

May 18, 2022

This collection of deliciously satirical sketches showing people's pretense in discussing things of which they know nothing was published in 1923. Join us for some advice from Hermione on topics like: “Prison Reform and Poise; An Example of Psychic Power; Some Beautiful Thoughts; The Bourgeois Elements and Background; Taking Up the Liquor Problem,” among many others.

Don Marquis was a newspaper columnist, humorist, poet, playwright and author, who’s work appeared regularly in the New York Post and Saturday Evening Post.

April 20, 2022

William Goyen said a short story was, “a rhythm, a charged movement, a chain of pulses or beats. To write out of life is to catch, in pace, this pulse that beats.”

In this story, a woman struggles to explain how she inherited a Venetian palazzo, describing an improbable friend of hers — the titular figure — who had more money than taste, but a knack for ensuring everyone had a good time.

March 23, 2022

In the wake of St. Patrick’s Day, Polly MacIntyre brings us stories that “radiate the sort of liquid cynicism which has marked the Irish literary voice from Swift through Frank McCourt,” according to Tim Treanor of DC Theatre Scene.

Treanor, in his review of MacIntyre’s performance of this piece at the Washington, DC Fringe Festival, goes on to say that “MacIntyre makes [them] sound rueful, wistful, and, with surprising frequency, funny.

That’s in large part because she excerpts her content from the writing of the fine, if underappreciated, Irish writer Edna O’Brien.”

Come join us for this celebration of Irish writing as told by an accomplished actress.

February 17, 2022

Need an antidote to sweetness and romance after another Hallmark Valentine’s Day?

Join us for the first in a new monthly series, Evening Reads, a wonderful alternative to same-old same-old television. Polly MacIntyre will do a dramatic reading of “Stone Mattress,” a short story by legendary writer Margaret Atwood.

The plot involves a woman whose life was ruined by a boy when she was in high school and how, decades later, she gets her revenge.