"Sometimes you gotta imagine further than you know is possible,
in order to solve the challenges you’ve got already."

Villanova Theatre is proud to announce our public reading of the 2022 Sue Winge Award-winning play SPACE, OR THE MERCURY 13 PLAY [An American Epic] directed by Brenna Geffers on Thursday, December 1st and Saturday, December 3rd at 8PM in the Smith Performance Lab at the John and Joan Mullen Center for the Performing Arts.

In 1960, in the shadow of NASA's celebrated Mercury 7 astronauts, the visionary Woman in Space program began in secret. Building on this long-neglected slice of American history, playwright L M Feldman’s vibrant, ambitious new play explodes outward to the present and beyond, raising critical questions about our current, fractured world and striving to envision a fairer, more enlightened future.

L M Feldman is a queer, GNC, feminist playwright who writes theatrically adventurous, physically evocative, intimate, inquisitive, ensemble-driven plays. Plays that are dynamic, honest, brave, and the smallest bit impossible. Plays that transcend into an experience. She was awarded an artist grant through the Boomerang Fund and a creation grant from the State of Vermont, and she has been an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony, Fresh Ground Pepper, Terra Firma, SPACE at Ryder Farm, the School of Making Thinking, Tofte Lake Center, Montana Artists Refuge, Montana Repertory Theatre, Sewanee University of the South, Cornell University, and Theater Emory/Brave New Works Festival. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, L is also a New Georges Affiliated Artist, a devised-work collaborator, a teacher of playwriting, and a freelance dramaturg.

Production dramaturg Tomas Torres remarks on the unique opportunity to be part of a project which deals with source material on such an epic scale. He is particularly excited to be part of the workshopping process that will culminate in the two public readings, helping to further shape this already transformative play.

The Sue Winge Playwriting Award was established in memory of beloved Villanova University employee Sue Winge, who served the University for many years in the Theatre Department and the President’s Office. The award annually supports the creation and development of new plays at Villanova University, including the recent Bakkhai Variations commissions and workshop of Julia Izumi’s Sometimes the Rain, Sometimes the Sea. Previous winners of the Competition include m4m by Mark Costello (MA ‘10), Reveille by Jessica Bedford (MA‘10), Pancake Queen by Brie Knight (MA‘14), Fluttering Pulses by Patrick Walsh (BA ‘16) and Fondest Wish by Kevin Esmond (MA ‘17) The Invisible Ones by Aly Gonzalez (MA '21) and Laundry by Megan Schumacher (MA '18).