Playwright and actor Ellen McLaughlin with Cecil Woolf, publisher and nephew of Leonard and Virginia, after the staging of Septimus and Clarissa at the 2015 Woolf conference.
Playwright and actor Ellen McLaughlin, who is well known among Virginia Woolf readers and scholars, has a new play on stage in New York City. Kissing the Floor, a radical retelling of the Antigone myth that is set in Depression Era America, is playing Feb. 23-March 12.
About McLaughlin and Woolf
I was first introduced to McLaughlin’s work when I attended her play Septimus and Clarissa at New York’s Baruch Performing Arts Center back in 2011 and wrote a review for this blog.
Since then, she staged Septimus and Clarissa at the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf in 2015, gave a plenary talk at the 2019 conference, and staged Woolf-related works at other Woolf conferences.
One of these was The Party—a one-woman play she wrote in collaboration with Kathleen Chalfant for the 2020 Woolf conference. It wove together three stories Woolf wrote while working on Mrs. Dalloway –- “The New Dress,” “Together and Apart,” and “A Summing Up.”
About Kissing the Floor
McLaughlin’s new play investigates the relationships among a set of siblings, all survivors of their family’s agonized, infamous legacy. Annie and her disturbed and disturbing brother, Paul, are knotted together by fate and a tortured love as their sister Izzy and their brother Eddie look on with dismay and all too much understanding.
It addresses these questions: Can one extricate oneself from a terrible past? What do we owe those who share our blood, however tainted?
How to book
Kissing the Floor is on stage at Theatre Row, 410 W. 42nd St. Tickets are priced at $42.50 and $57.50 and can be booked online. Use Code: EARLYBIRD to get tickets for $32.50, inclusive of all fees. Offer valid for all purchases before Feb. 15.
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