Playwright Caleen Sinnette Jennings: Up Close in Everyman's "Salon Series: Women's Voices"

Four seasons ago, Baltimore's Everyman Theater launched an initiative called the “Salon Series: Women's Voices," a program that explores the work of women playwrights in informal staged readings, directed by the women members of the Everyman Resident Acting Company.  On Monday night, March 18, the new Salon Series season begins with "What's Next?" -- readings of the work of Washington-DC based playwright Caleen Sinnette Jennings, who is also a professor of theater at American University.  Jennings is the author, recently, of two semi-autobiographical plays,Queens Girl in the Worldand Queens Girl in Africa, which will close out the Everyman season later this spring.  The one-woman performances will be directed by Paige Hernandez, and feature first Dawn Ursula and then Erika Rose, in the plays' solo roles.  The Everyman has commissioned a third play to round out the trilogy, called Queens Girl:  Black in the Green Mountains.  That play will be performed at Everyman next season, but it’s one of the works-in-progress that will be part of the staged reading at Everyman on Monday night, with director Hernandez, and actors Ursula and Rose joining playwright Jennings in the Everyman Rehearsal Hall.  Today, Caleen Sinnette Jennings joins Tom on the line from Washington to discuss the genesis of the Queens Girl plays, and the playwrighting craft she'll be spotlighting at Monday's Salon event.