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The Last Babushka by Amy Wheeler - Staged Reading

  • Whidbey Island Center for the Arts PO Box 52 | 565 Camano Avenue Langley, WA 98260 (map)

Island Shakespeare Festival in Collaboration with WICA Presents:
August Wednesdays at WICA

Join us for “Bard Parties” from 6-7pm outside under the WICA tent and then inside for a show at 7:30pm!

Closing out on Wednesday, August 30th with a staged reading of The Last Babushka, a musical play by Amy Wheeler inspired by Holly Morris’ award-winning documentary film The Babushkas of Chernobyl (streaming on Amazon Prime).

Set in Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone in 2017, a post-nuclear radioactive “no man’s land” and thriving green world, Wheeler’s cross-generational matriarchal story follows three wise elders who are living illegally in their villages in the Zone, and a charismatic young rock musician who is venturing in, also illegally, to reconcile her past. First generation Ukrainian-American composer Natalie Nowytski weaves together a spellbinding mash-up of traditional Ukrainian village music with contemporary folk-rock, acoustic and electric. This timely tale explores questions we are all grappling with, in this era of environmental crisis and rising female energy, about our intrinsic connections to our motherland, nature and each other.

Development of The Last Babushka has been supported so far by Seattle’s 5th Ave Theatre, Tofte Lake Center and Theatre Latte Da in Minnesota.

Pay What You Will enabled for all performances; must be through box office an hour or closer to the start of show.

Every Wednesday in August
7:30 PM

Tickets available:
$50, $30, $15
Pay What You Will
Patron’s choice

Earlier Event: August 26
Marley Erickson and Mark Findlay in Concert
Later Event: September 2
Woodpalooza

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Whidbey Island Center for the Arts would like to begin by acknowledging that we gather on the ancestral homelands, originally known as Tscha-kole-chy (SHA-KOL-CHI) in Lushootseed (LU-SHOOT-SEED), of the Coastal Salish Peoples, on the lands of the lower Skagit, Tulalip (tuh·lay·luhp), Swinomish (SWIN-ə-mish), Snohomish (snō-hō-mish), Stillaguamish (still-uh-GWAH-mish), and Suquamish (soo-kwah-mish), who have lived in the Salish Sea basin since time immemorial and have hunted, fished, gathered, and taken care of these lands.

We respect their sovereignty, their right to self-determination, and we honor their sacred spiritual connection with the land and water.

Please join us in expressing our deepest respect and gratitude to the indigenous people of this territory and for their enduring care and protection of the land in which we currently occupy and share through the Treaty of Point Elliott signed by 82 tribes in Múckl-te-óh (Mukilteo) on January 22, 1855.