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Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets at Hartford Stage
 | | Diane Venora in rehearsal for Hartford Stage’s world premiere production of Necessary Targets. |
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The Hartford Stage's world premiere production of Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets runs November 23 through December 23 at the Tony Award-winning theatre, located at 50 Church Street in Hartford.
Necessary Targets, the story of two Americans who go to war-torn Bosnia to assist refugee women in confronting the devastation of their homeland and shattered lives, has received star-studded readings in Sarajevo, New York and Los Angeles. For the world premiere, artistic director Michael Wilson and Ensler, the Obie Award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, have assembled an outstanding acting ensemble including multiple Tony and Emmy Award-winner and two-time Oscar nominee Shirley Knight, Hartford-born film and stage star Diane Venora, and Broadway veteran Rosemary Murphy.
Actress Meryl Streep, who participated in a New York reading of the play, states that Necessary Targets is "a journey into the very human stories behind the headlines … a brave, powerful, and crucial testimony against violence aimed at women as an act of war." Based on interviews conducted by Ensler with numerous women who survived the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, Necessary Targets has become all the more relevant and powerful in the wake of our current war in Afghanistan. Two American women, a Park Avenue psychiatrist and an ambitious young writer, travel to Bosnia to help women refugees confront their memories of war. Though the two have little in common beyond the methods they use to distance themselves from their subjects, they emerge deeply changed as they confront their own fears in the face of violence, resiliency and war.
Necessary Targets is performed by an all-female ensemble. Shirley Knight (JS) and Catherine Kellner (Melissa) play the Americans, and Diane Venora (Zlata), Alyssa Bresnahan (Jelena), Rosemary Murphy (Azra), Marika Dominczyk (Seada) and Maria Thayer (Nuna) play the Bosnian women.
Tickets are $22-$60; for more info call 860-527-5151, or visit <www.hartfordstage.org>.
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