Playwright Claudia Stevens will perform her solo play “Blue Lias—or The Fish Lizard’s Whore” at Millsaps College on Tuesday, October 2, at 7:30 p.m. The performance, which will take place in the Ford Academic Complex Recital Hall, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Darby Ray at 601-974-1337.
Stevens wrote the text for “Blue Lias” in 2005-6 while in residence at Brandeis University as Visiting Scholar/Artist at the Women’s Studies Research Center. The piece deals with the clash of religion and science in 19th-century England, as well as issues of class and gender, as given expression in the life, personality and career of the renowned fossil collector Mary Anning.
Performer-playwright Stevens was born in Redding, Calif., to Czech and Austrian parents. She graduated summa cum laude from Vassar College; from UC-Berkeley, where she was awarded the Alfred Hertz Prize in piano; and from Boston University, receiving the doctor of musical arts under Leonard Shure. She has taught at Williams College and the College of William and Mary, where she is currently adjunct associate professor of piano. Claudia established a second career as musician-actor and playwright, receiving grants from the International Theater Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts (twelve consecutive grants), and residencies including the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, RS9 Szinhaz in Budapest and the Baltimore Theater Project. She is author of a dozen monodramas, several of which are published in recent issues of the journal “Exquisite Corpse.”
