Lauren Korn chats with co-producers Leanette Galaz and Nick Rapp about A Different Kind of Woman, a staged, dramatic reading happening in Whitefish at the O’Shaughnessy Cultural Arts Center August 26th and 27th (at 7:30PM each night).
From the a press release of the performance:
This event is a staged dramatic reading of a new and original play about Whitefish, adapted from an Irish classic. This is not a fully realized theatre production.
In A Different Kind of Woman, we follow the story of Christina Guzman, a California transplant of Mexican American ancestry, who, in her attempt to walk out on her marriage, believes she has accidentally killed her husband. She arrives in Whitefish, Montana, with the hope of escaping and forgetting her past completely. But this isn’t a play about Christina Guzman. As with John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, this play’s inspiration, this is a play where the outsider acts as the catalyst for the town to become known unto itself. Many characters take an initial liking to Christina, as her expressed qualities of a pioneer spirit and rugged individualism resonate with the locals here in Northwest Montana. She finds the favor and social approval she had craved so badly in her life before to be in abundance here. She seeks to capitalize on her public popularity through social and political initiatives, including, importantly, real development with the housing crisis in Whitefish. But her progress as a resident and as a reformer are thwarted as her past catches up to her. How Whitefish as a town responds to her public initiatives against the backdrop of controversy in her personal life is where the conflict of the play explodes into theatre.
Learn more via the Montana Art Theatre website here. Purchase tickets for these Whitefish performances in August here.