BUTTERFLY WALTZ by Pamela Jafari performed by Quarantine Players

Welcome to the Quarantine Players We are a group of playwrights, actors, and directors who meet once a week to read plays together. Tonight we are reading Butterly Waltz by Washington, DC playwright, Pamela Jafari Please take a minute to support the actors in this performance please visit https://cash.app/$pjafariwrites to make a contribution, all amounts are appreciated. Trigger warning: This is a story about domestic violence in a ten-year lesbian marriage and takes place here in the close-knit queer community of DC. There is profanity, references to rape, alcohol abuse, and derogatory references to a transgender character in the story. The story is complex and unflinching. It is about the lies we tell ourselves to make unbearable situations bearable. We talk about the power of theater to invoke empathy and connection but then ask playwrights to dumb it down or change the stories so people will "like it" One of the benefits to our Quarantine Players process is that we can take the entire story as is to the audience as the playwright conceived it. No comprises, no infringement, no happy endings needed here. Pamela Jafari is a DC-based playwright who marries modern-day content based storytelling with traditional theater's masked Greek chorus. The chorus, in this case, will represent the competing aspects of the emotional state of the abuser because the abuser is disconnected from her emotions. There are three characters in this greek chorus Anger, Bitter and Lonely. If this were an on-stage production, we would have each character wearing a mask that would suggest the emotion. You can tell that the characters are speaking in the chorus because they have broken sentences and blurt words out. Let's meet our characters -Veronica Browne-Barnes / Paula -Myrrh Cauthen /Doc Alexander/Jeri/ Lonely - Kee Kee Funches/Valerie/ Anger - Andrea Sanderson/ Gloria/ Bitter - Beverly "Chocolate" White/ Mynite Reading Stage Direction: Jesse Roberts Playwright: Pamela Jafari