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Heather Woodbury, winner of the inaugural Spalding Gray Award and a 2007 OBIE recipient, brings her new one-woman play to Austin for the Texas premiere, directed by Abigail Deser.
"In her latest piece, The Last Days of Desmond Nani Reese: A Stripper's History of the World . . . Heather Woodbury has that gift common to all mesmerizing performance artists -- an ability to capture an audience's imagination as much with her story as her singularly flamboyant way of telling it.
-Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2008
Austin audiences remember Heather Woodbury for her groundbreaking one-woman epic, Whatever, which played to packed houses at The VORTEX over many years and won an Austin Critics’ Table Award for Best Touring Show. Now Heather Woodbury brings an entirely new show to Austin, playing both roles in her critically-acclaimed new play, The Last Days of Desmond Nani Reese: A Stripper’s History of the World.
It's the year 2014 and a young "ethno-femino-dance anthropologist" travels to a post-quake, post-drought afflicted Los Angeles to research her 10,000-page dissertation on "The History of the World, as Told by Loose Women." Her final subject: the half-mad, 108-year old legendary stripper Desmond "Nani" Reese, who is holed up in a shack on an Echo Park hillside overlooking the five freeway. With some prodding, the profanity-spewing recluse -who often insists on conversing with her 27 cats- unfurls a life story that includes surviving the Oklahoma dust bowl, riding the rails as a girl wrestler, and close encounters with Salvador Dali at the 1939 World’s Fair. As tensions rise, Amber, the young academic, is at last compelled to confront her own hidden life as a dabbler in the erotic underworld. In the process, these two unlikely heroines puzzle out the history of the 20th century and the future of our planet, and what that has to do with outlaw females throughout human kind’s history- from high priestess oracles in the caves of ancient Greece - to forgotten "show-girls" in bramble covered shacks.
Heather is featured on John Aeilli's online show at http://kut.org/unleashed/
You can hear a few excerpts from the show. Check it out. She is such an excellent writer and performer.
For tickets call The VORTEX Box Office 512-478-LAVA (5282).
www.vivavortex.org
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