junction with Fredericksburg Summer Theatre. Elizabeth Palmer left Mary

junction with Fredericksburg Summer Theatre.

Elizabeth Palmer left Mary Washington to pursue theatre at StratfordUpon Avon, England, at the University of Minnesota, and most recently at the University of Virginia, where she just completed her Master’s in Playwrighting.

“Crows” was a play she wrote as a qualifier for beginning her thesis work, and was originally intended to be performed in conjunction with another play. The version that will be presented at the Gay Street Theatre was revised specifically for this performance in Rappahannock, with the setting changed and a new character added. The play is mercurial in its dialogue and allusions—shifting from periods of silence to rapid-fire exchanges, discussing a cup of tea one moment and something more subtle the next, sometimes funny, sometimes sad,

Cathy Kiley, a Rappahannock resident and oral historian whose first venture at playwrighting was her tremendously successful production of “Voices,” is continuing in the same vein in her new work, “Unfinished Business.” Cathy’s process is unique— working from her tapes of conversations with Rappahannock’s oldest generation, she casts her play and then collaborates with her actors in writing the script through theuse of improvisation.

In this way each actor is intimately involved with the characters, and Cathy as a writer has two sources from which to work—from the real people from whom she has gathered her stories and the actors’ interpretations of these people.

After “Voices”, Cathy felt that there was more to be communicated about the Rappahannock women she had interviewed, and began to work on a shorter play specifically on country women. She and her cast plan to perform the finished version of the play later this winter in a women’s festival in Harrisonburg; however, due to the