The Word: The Forest (Virtual Reading + Conversation) PLEASE REGISTER for OPENING NIGHT LIVE!!!
Please join us on Monday, May 24th at 6 PM PST for a special presentation of Lia Romeo‘s The Forest (virtual reading + conversation) directed by Diana Wyenn. This event is presented by The Road Theatre Company in collaboration with the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement Prevention Center at Cleveland Clinic.
Juliet is losing her marriage. Her mother Pam is losing her memory to dementia. And there’s a mysterious forest growing in their living room.
Join us for a virtual reading of Lia Romeo poignant play about grief, weird love, and what to do when there aren’t any right answers. Directed by Diana Wyenn and featuring Carlyle King, Krishna Smitha, Leandro Cano, and Ronaldo Medina, this virtual reading will be presented on our YouTube channel after opening night LIVE and immediately followed by a live post-event conversation on zoom between the audience, the playwright, and Dr. Jessica Caldwell, Ph.D., Director, Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement Prevention Center at Cleveland Clinic.
The Forest is a 2018 O’Neill Playwrights Conference selection, was featured on the 2019 Kilroys List, and was scheduled to receive a NNPN rolling world premiere in the 2020/2021 season (postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic).
The Forest
Playwright: Lia Romeo
Director: Diana Wyenn
Producer: David Meyers
Featuring: Carlyle King, Krishna Smitha, Leandro Cano, and Ronaldo Alexander-Mateo Medina.
Invited Guest: Dr. Jessica Caldwell, Ph.D.
To learn about our collaborator the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement Prevention Center at Cleveland Clinic, visit https://womenpreventalz.org/
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BIOS
Lia Romeo is a 2021-2022 fellow in the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard. Her plays have received workshops and residencies from the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, the Lark, the National New Play Network’s MFA Playwrights Workshop, Orlando Shakespeare Theatre’s PlayFest, and others, and have been produced at 59E59, Unicorn Theatre, Project Y Theatre Company, New Jersey Repertory Theatre, Dreamcatcher Rep, HotCity Theatre, and elsewhere. Four of her plays have been recognized by the Kilroys List, and she has been a nominee or a finalist for the Steinberg Award, the Kesselring Prize, the Weissberger Award, PlayPenn, the NYIT Award for outstanding full-length script, and other honors. She was the winner of City Theatre’s National Short Playwriting Award, and was an Individual Artist Fellowship winner in playwriting from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, Dramatists Play Service, and Smith & Kraus. She is also the author of a novel, Dating the Devil (BelleBooks), and a humor book, 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About (Abrams Image), which has sold over 35,000 copies. She earned her B.A. from Princeton University and her M.F.A. in playwriting from Rutgers/MGSA, and she teaches in the MA program in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Dr. Jessica Caldwell earned her A.B. with highest honors in psychology at Princeton University, and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology with a minor in neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She completed predoctoral internship at Harvard University/Massachusetts General Hospital and postdoctoral fellowship in neuropsychology and neuroimaging at Brown University. She currently holds a primary academic appointment as Assistant Professor of Medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, in the Department of Neurology. She also holds a secondary appointment as Assistant Professor at Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, in the Department of Neurosciences. Dr. Caldwell, who serves as director of the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement Prevention Center at Cleveland Clinic, is passionate about Alzheimer’s disease prevention, studying sex differences in Alzheimer’s disease, and addressing these differences in the real world. Her clinical neuropsychology work focuses on assessing women at risk for dementia as well as adult and geriatric patients with concerns of memory loss. Her research examines the ways that Alzheimer’s disease development and brain impact differs in men and women, and also explores Alzheimer’s prevention approaches in women.