Flashpoint Theatre Company Closes With World Premiere of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s SLIP/SHOT April 11-May 5

by Patricia Bradford

PHILADELPHIA — Flashpoint Theatre Company is closing its season with the World Premiere of Jacqueline Goldfinger’s SLIP/SHOT. Goldfinger has emerged as a leading voice of playwrights in the region, with her World Premieres of the terrible girls (Azuka Theatre, 2010) and Hershel & The Hanukkah Goblins (Gas & Electric Arts, 2011) receiving critical and popular acclaim. SLIP/SHOT will run from April 11 to May 5 at the Adrienne’s Second Stage, located at 2030 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA. Opening night is Friday, April 13 at 8 p.m. Tickets cost $22 general admission and $15 for students/seniors For more information, please visit www.flashpointtheatre.org.

Slip/Shot asks questions about family loyalty as well as the conscious and subconscious influence of upbringing on our perspectives. Set in Tallahassee, Florida in the early 1960’s, Kitty and Clem fall in love and escape from their dysfunctional families in each other. But when an ordinary night devolves into a terrible shooting, they tear themselves apart trying to figure out what went wrong. SLIP/SHOT is an exciting new work about the malleability of truth, and how we re-imagine history to protect the ones we love.

This World Premiere is directed by emerging director Rebecca Wright. Flashpoint Artistic Director Thom Weaver is designing the lights. SLIP/SHOT finishes Weaver’s second season as Flashpoint’s Artistic Director. Weaver is a multiple award winning lighting designer whose tenure at Flashpoint has garnered significant critical attention, including Run, Mourner, Run, which has been nominated for an Independence Foundation Award for Outstanding New Play. Weaver and Wright are joined by an exciting cast including two-time Barrymore nominated Keith Conallen, Kevin Meehan, Rachel Camp (Barrymore winner 2011), and three-time Barrymore nominated Cathy Simpson. Rounding out the cast is Akeem Davis, Erik Endsley, and Taysha Canales. The design team includes Scenic Designer Caitlin Lainoff, Sound Designer Larry Fowler, and Costume Designer Alisa Sickora Kleckner.

“The play began as a ghost story, with the characters haunted by the specters of their fathers,” said Goldfinger. “Most of the action in SLIP/SHOT takes place within the confines of small Southern kitchens where we can feel the permanence of each family’s legacy, their unseen ghosts. Although a mentor emerges as a father figure for Clem, offering him an alternative way forward, Clem is unable to shake the damaging lessons he internalized from his father, consciously and unconsciously, and so is blind to the redemption and hope within his grasp.”

“What attracts me to Jackie’s work most is the unique quality of her voice,” said Artistic Director Weaver. “There’s something decidedly southern-gothic about it, along the lines of Faulkner or Berendt. In her work, you kind of taste the moss growing on trees and smell the rain. Her characters, regardless of the period, seem to be grown from their environment rather than be placed in it. Therefore their actions seem to have a certain inevitability. The power of her work is in the irrevocable consequences of her character’s actions.”

About Flashpoint Theatre Company

Flashpoint Theatre Company produces socially provocative and emotionally resonant works of new and contemporary theatre in the greater Philadelphia area, while giving voice to a diverse group of emerging artists.

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