Ithaca College

GRAND CONCOURSE is the culminating event in the New Voices Festival, sponsored by faculty members Chris Holmes (English) and Eleanor Henderson (Writing). The reading will be directed by Claire Gleitman (English), assistant directed by Ithaca College alumna Lucy Gram, and its cast will include faculty members Paula Murray Cole (Theatre) and Kevin Murphy (English), as well as current IC theatre majors Laura Brennan and Jose Useche. The play's author, Heidi Schreck, will be in attendance for the reading and will participate in a talk-back about the play and her other work immediately following the reading.

A finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to recognize outstanding work by women in the theatre, GRAND CONCOURSE had its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in New York City in 2014. The play focuses upon a group of people who work in a soup kitchen—an experience its author, Heidi Schreck, knows intimately, as she grew up working in soup kitchens as well as other social service organizations. At the heart of the play is a nun named Shelley who is experiencing a crisis of faith, one exacerbated by her sense that she can do so little for the suffering people who rely upon her services, as well as by a gradually awakening recognition that the doctrines of the Church fail to equip her for the challenges of her lived experience. When she finds herself professionally and personally entangled with a volatile young woman who comes to work at the soup kitchen, Shelley arrives at an altered understanding of her relationship to her faith and the presumed moral imperative of unconditional forgiveness.