A Talented Woman, now at the Cotuit Center of the Arts, follows the tumultuous lives of three generations of women living in Manhattan during the Great Recession—a recently widowed grandmother on the verge of financial ruin, her workaholic daughter struggling to balance her professional and family lives and her 14-year-old hellion of a granddaughter.
Ricocheting between hilarity, insight, pathos and pain, this sophisticated comedy by Lynda Sturner and Jim Dalglish, explores the issues women face at three important stages of their lives.
Featured in A Talented Woman are Anna Botsford, Orla Delaney, Beau Jackett, Ian Pádraic Ryan, Lynda Sturner and Tony Travostino.
A Talented Woman is directed by Jim Dalglish, writer/director of four CCftA favorites: Bark Park, Unsafe, Lines in the Sand and Dark Tales Told on a Cold Autumn Eve. Jim is the author of more than 25 plays – shorts, one acts and full lengths. These have been produced across the United States as well as in Ireland and Great Britain and have won awards, with two of them having been anthologized. One in The Best 10 Minute Plays for 2 Actors, (Smith & Kraus, 2007) and The Black Eye in the 2013 edition of The Amsterdam Quarterly. A Talented Woman – Jim’s collaboration with the multi-talented Lynda Sturner – is the winner of the New Playwright, New Plays Competition, is the winner of the 2013 Jeremiah Kaplan New Play Prize and was a semi finalist at the 2013 National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Developed through workshops at The Actors Studio in New York and the McCarter Theater Lab at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, A Talented Woman has received public readings at The Actors Studio, the McCarter Theatre, the Playwright’s Festival at The Provincetown Theater and at CCftA’s 2nd Wednesday Reading Series. Jim’s play Unsafe was a semifinalist at the 2008 National Playwrights Conference and was produced in Cotuit, Massachusetts and Boston in a co-production between Cotuit Center for the Arts and Boston Public Works. Jim is an Accomplice member of Interim Writers – a playwright lab in Boston – and has recently joined Boston Public Works, a collaborative of writers who have adopted the 13P approach to self production. He holds a masters degree from Brown University, where his thesis advisor was Paula Vogel.
Lynda Sturner is a playwright and actress, whose work has been produced in New York. Tokyo, Provincetown and Valdez, Alaska. Her short play, Look What You Made Me Do, won the Audience Choice award at The Edward Albee Last Frontier Theatre Festival and is published in Rowing to America: An Anthology of New Short Plays by Women from The Women’s Project. The Death of Huey Newton was published by Broadway Play Publishing. The Victim Art Show, on a double bill with Jim Dalglish’s Love and Death and Isabelle Stewart Gardner, was named one of the top theatre works of the year by the Cape Cod Times. Lynda appeared on Broadway in Oliver and Off-Broadway in The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. On Cape Cod, she has appeared in dozens of shows over the last 10 years, including The Food Chain, Gamma Rays… and eight plays written by Meryl Cohn. She was the Artistic Director of the Provincetown Repertory Theatre and was the founding Artistic Director of Playwright’s Forum, Inc. in New York City, was a member of the Actor’s Studio Playwright’s Unit and the Women’s Project. Lynda was also co-president of The League of Professional Theatre Women in New York.
So how do two people of very different backgrounds—Lynda Sturner, a denizen of the Upper East Side in New York City and Jim Dalglish, a prairie boy from North Dakota—manage to collaborate on a full-length play?
According to Lynda, better known to Ptown NiteLife readers as “LaLa” in her column, “The Ptown Buzz, “We’d written another play together, a short called Superlubricated.”
“It went well. I mean, we didn’t kill each other,” added Jim. “We,” countered Lynda, “came close!”
They have a very solid friendship; otherwise, Jim added, “We probably wouldn’t be talking to each other right now.” She called him “soooo mean” and he he referred to her as “the most difficult woman on earth.”
And here they are, years later, with a new show.
Cotuit Center of the Arts – 4404 Falmouth Rd, Cotuit, MA (508)428-0669
March 21 – April 7, 2019
Thursday-Saturday at 7:30pm
Sunday at 2:00pm
Tickets $35, $30 for balcony seating
$5 discount for members, $2 discount for seniors/veterans
Click here for tickets
“A Talented Woman benefits from clever dialogue, fine acting, and brisk and engaging scene changes.”
– Cape Cod Times
“The Cotuit iteration has great production values, keen direction and noteworthy acting”.
– Cape Cod Times
“You will laugh. You may even cry. It’s a good night out.”
– Cape Cod Times
“The cast meshes under Jim Dalglish’s direction: [Anna] Botsford’s Victoria is brash, powerful and vulnerable…[Beau] Jackett is at once empathetic and sympathetic…[Orla] Delaney as the bratty teen is convincing, hilarious, and heartbreaking…[Lynda] Sturner is a crowd pleaser.”
– Cape Cod Times
“The complex Set Design by Glenn Bassett, Score and Sound Design by J. Hagenbuckle, Lighting Design by Greg Hamm and Costume Design by Tami Trask are all indicative of superb theatrical talent behind the scenes. Attention should also be paid to the Stage Crew who manage to pull off quite impressively the complicated scenic changes.”
– South Shore Critic
