Events
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Start: 6:30 pm
Elliott Bay's Drama Book Group, Stages, meets once a month to read, enjoy and discuss great plays and dramatic works, contemporary and classic, from the U.S. and around the world. We start the new year with the newest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Ruined by Lynn Nottage. A rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo is the setting for Lynn Nottage's extraordinary new play. The establishment's shrewd matriarch, Mama Nadi, keeps peace between customers from both sides of the civil war, as government soldiers and rebel forces alike choose from her inventory of women, many already "ruined" by rape and torture when they were pressed into prostitution. Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage has crafted an engrossing and uncommonly human story with humor and song served alongside its postcolonial and feminist politics in the rich theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage. Please join us for a thoughful discussion on this important new play.
Start: 7:00 pm
Keith Stern's Queers in History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgenders (Benbella Books) began as a self-published database on a diskette, first sold at A Different Light Bookstore in West Hollywood in 1993. Then it had a life on the internet. Now at over 900 entries, Queers in History is also a comprehensive, fascinating, and thoroughly enjoyable book. Join Keith Stern for this Pioneer Square talk—a neighborhood that once was home to many of the bars, clubs, and bathhouses of Seattle's gay community. "Keith Stern is a rare historian who reports his findings with wit and passion, and he can be trusted. But if one or two of the names entered in his engaging list are doubtful about their inclusion, perhaps they won't on reflection, object much to being between the sheets with Michelangelo and Armistead Maupin—what could be cozier?" - Sir Ian McKellen.
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