Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s (BWBTC) 2025 season opens with an extended run of its new works festival, the Fighting Words Festival, September 6 – 14 at the Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 N. Clark St, 2nd Floor. All performances are $5 or pay-what-you-can with a suggested ticket price of $10. Following each reading, audiences may provide feedback and participate in a post-show discussion.Tickets go on sale Friday, Aug. 1 at 12 p.m. at BabesWithBlades.org.
“Audiences underestimate how much they can influence a new play simply by attending a reading,” states Artistic Director Hayley Rice. “While written notes and critiques are invaluable, just hearing how an audience connects with a story in the moment is pivotal for playwrights. Fighting Words is an opportunity to do exactly that.”All three shows bring something very different to the stage. Chicago theater, and Babes With Blades especially, is not afraid to tell new narratives that represent folks from every corner of society and history and this season’s festival does that.”
FIGHTING WORDS FESTIVAL
September 6 - 14
Performance Running Time: TBA
Ticket Price: Beginning at $10
All performances will take place at the Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 N. Clark St, 2nd Floor. Select performances will be available for streaming.
Each weekend the festival will have staged readings of the 2025 selections:
CALVARIA: A PLAY FOR FERAL GIRLS
Winner of the 2025 - 2026 Babes With Blades Theatre Company's Margaret W. Martin Award and the Joining Sword and Pen International Playwriting Competition
Saturday, Sept. 6 at 2:30 p.m.
Saturday, Sept. 13 at 7:30 p.m.
By Maggie Smith (she/her)
Directed by BWBTC Ensemble Member Morgan Manasa (she/her)
Fight Direction by Jessica Pennachio (she/her)
When her family’s bull is found decapitated in the middle of a farm field, Edie Hruska makes it her mission to find the culprit. While on her search, she comes across a group of young girls claiming to communicate with gods, begging Edie to become their newest acolyte. While acclimating to their lifestyle, Edie finds herself face-to-face with the girls’ true intentions, and they are much more sinister than just a dead bull.
TWO OUT OF THREE FALLS
Sunday, Sept. 7 at 2:30 p.m.
Saturday, Sept. 13 at 2:30 p.m.
By Bill Daniel (he/him)
Directed by BWBTC Artistic Associate Ashley Yates (she/her)
Fight Direction by Axel Rico (he/him)
Johanna Goodish was the child of notorious pro wrestler King Kong Bruiser. Thirty years ago, he was murdered in a locker room shower in Puerto Rico and the killer was never tried. The witnesses never talked. Since she began her own wrestling career, she has been trying to escape his shadow. And now, she's been seeing his ghost. When an opportunity for revenge presents itself, she takes it. But it means she'll be face to face in the ring with the man who held the knife when it happened.
yo ho.
Saturday, Sept. 6 at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, Sept. 14 at 2:30 p.m.
By SMJ (they/them)
Directed by BWBTC Artistic Associate Maureen Yasko (she/her)
Fight Direction by Carly Belle Cason (she/they)
yo ho. charts the journey of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two pirates aboard a campy, sexually charged ship under immediate threat from the crown. Equal parts historical fantasy and introspective sexual and gender exploration, this play is a deeply emotional reimaging and reminder of our queer histories.
ABOUT MAGGIE SMITH, PLAYWRIGHT OF CALVARIA
Maggie Smith (she/her) is a playwright, performer and comedian based in Chicago, Illinois. Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, Smith moved to Chicago to attend Loyola University Chicago, where she received a BA in theatre, while minoring in English and Shakespeare studies. At Loyola, she led two projects, Rats and Saint Louise, a devised parody musical and Pray for Us, a staged reading of her two-act play. Upon graduating Loyola, she was accepted into the Second City’s Conservatory Training Program, where she completed her training in September, 2023. As a writer, Smith challenges herself and her audiences to process difficult topics through comedic lenses. She takes from her own life experiences to create a casual representation of the queer experience. In order to depict an experience that she is familiar with, she prefers to write characters in stories where their identities are not the driving force of the piece. Because of this, she finds herself called to place queer characters at the forefront of comedies. After all, that's what her life is.
ABOUT BILL DANIEL, PLAYWRIGHT OF TWO OUT OF THREE FALLS
Bill Daniel is an actor/playwright living in the city of Chicago. A graduate of Illinois State University, Daniel has spent over a decade in Chicago creating silly stories for silly people. As a playwright, he has written for WildClaw Theatre (Hell Followed With Her, Cavities), E.D.G.E. Theatre (Holmes vs. Holmes, What’s All This Then, La Mousquetaire, Through Black Glass), Illinois State University’s Freestage Festival (The Glass Man, Pingree Road), McHenry County College (What’s All This Then), The Living Canvas (Rain), Nothing Special Productions (Manhunt: The Great Waldo Search), Woodstock’s TownSquare Players (Sitting at the Kid’s Table), Hobo Junction (The Great Sloppy Joe Extermination, Steeping the Tea) and Wayward Productions (Frock Club). In 2013, Smith undertook a project inspired by Suzan Lori-Parks, wherein he wrote a short play every day for an entire year.
ABOUT SMJ, PLAYWRIGHT OF YO HO.
SMJ (they/them) is a mixed-Latiné, non-binary playwright and theatermaker originally from Mount Vernon, OH. They were a 2022-2023 Dramatists Guild Foundation fellow. Currently, SMJ is creating work with Latinx Playwrights Circle, The Orchard Project and Andy’s Summer Playhouse. Their work has been seen in various forms with Ars Nova, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, New York Stage and Film, Latiné Musical Theatre Lab, National Queer Theater, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Otterbein University, Wright State University, University of Texas-El Paso, Art House Productions, The Road Theatre Company, The Flea Theater, Live Arts, The DR2 Theatre, The Vineyard Theatre, American Theatre Group, The Arden Theater and The Tank. SMJ has been a finalist for the 2024-25 Princess Grace Award in Playwriting at New Dramatists, 2024 June Bingham New Playwright Commission, 2023 Parity Development Award, 2024 Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative at Illinois State University and Write Out Loud as well as a semifinalist for the O’Neill’s National Playwrights Conference (three times), the 2022-23 Princess Grace Award in Playwriting at New Dramatists and the Van Lier Fellowship at Rattlestick Theater. They are a member of the Dramatists Guild and Ring of Keys.
ABOUT FIGHTING WORDS FESTIVAL
Fighting Words is Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s script development program. Each season three scripts are chosen for development and each one is read aloud three times–first within the company, then with a small group of invited guests and finally as part of the Fighting Words Festival that includes all three plays. Every other season the winner of BWBTC’s International Playwriting Competition and the Margaret W. Martin Award is automatically included as a part of the process. During the Festival, discussions after each reading provide feedback for the playwrights, assisting them in developing their scripts further.
ABOUT JOINING SWORD & PEN INTERNATIONAL PLAYWRIGHTING COMPETITION AND THE MARGARET W. MARTIN AWARD
The Joining Sword & Pen international playwriting competition launched in 2005 to generate more scripts that featured women in roles involving stage combat. Created in collaboration with Artistic Advisor and Society of American Fight Directors Fight Master David Woolley who sponsors the competition, scripts inspired by a specific image are submitted and go through a blind judging process. The winning script goes through BWBTC’s new play development program, but also receives a full production, cash prize and the Margaret W. Martin Award.
Margaret W. Martin was ahead of her time. In the 1960s and 70s, she maintained her full time job, taught piano and raised a family of six children (four girls, two boys) all while she traveled the globe from the United States to Saudi Arabia, across Europe and Vientiane Laos during the height of the Vietnam war. She founded the American International School – Riyadh (K-12) in Saudi Arabia in 1963 and it has flourished as an institution since. The Margaret W. Martin Award is in honor of Artistic Advisor and Society of American Fight Directors Fight Master David Woolley’s mother.
ABOUT BABES WITH BLADES THEATRE COMPANY
Babes With Blades Theatre Company – for over the past 25 years and moving into the future – strives to develop and present scripts focused on complex, dynamic (often combative) characters who continue to be underrepresented on theatre stages based on gender. Babes With Blades Theatre Company uses (and will continue to use) stage combat to tell stories that elevate the voices of underrepresented communities and dismantle the patriarchy.
In each element of their programming, they embrace two key concepts:
1) Folks of marginalized genders and underrepresented communities are central to the story, driving the action rather than responding or submitting to it.
2) Everyone is capable of a full emotional and physical range, up to and including violence and its consequences.
The company offers participants and patrons alike an unparalleled opportunity to experience every person as heroes and villains; rescuers and rescues; right, wrong and everywhere in between: exciting, vivid, dynamic PEOPLE. It’s as simple and as subversive as that.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT STATEMENT:
Babes With Blades Theatre Company produces theatre in venues located on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. Many other tribes such as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, and Fox also called this area home. This region that we now commonly refer to as “The Chicagoland Area”, has long been a center for Indigenous people to gather, trade, and maintain kinship ties. Today, one of the largest urban Native American communities in the United States resides in Chicago. Members of this community continue to contribute to the life of this city and to celebrate their heritage, practice traditions and care for the land and waterways.
Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s 2025 programming is partially made possible by the kind support of The Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, a grant from The Illinois Arts Council Agency, a CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events (DCASE) and the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation.
Top row (L to R): Morgan Manasa, (she/her) director, Calvaria and Maggie Smith, (she/her) playwright, Calvaria
Second row (L to R): SMJ, (they/them) playwright, yo ho and Maureen Yasko. (she/her) director, yo ho
Third row (L to R): Bill Daniel, (he/him) playwright, Two Out of Three Falls and Ashley Yates, (she/her) director, Two Out of Three Falls