Martha Mitchell
In Mostly Her Own Words

Music
By Jean Ives Ducornet, Marie Buigues, and Joan Faber

Actor: Geralyn Horton
Director: June Lewin
Pianist: Joan Faber

In 1973, a year after the break-in, Martha Mitchell, 55, tells her side of the Watergate story. She traces her life from the blissful early days of marriage to John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, to her colorful glory days as “Martha the Mouth”, to her downfall as the much maligned “Cassandra of Watergate.” Nixon later said, “Without Martha Mitchell, there never would have been a Watergate.”

Martha Mitchell has been performed at Playwrights Platform and Theatre Lobby in Boston, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Theatre Center Philadelphia, as well as at Tufts University and the University of Connecticut.

The Scotsman, Scotland’s National Newspaper, wrote “Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro pulls no punches in her frighteningly revelatory script of an era in US history that must go down as one of the most corrupt and shocking. No less shocking was the ruination of a principled woman. Ms. Horton lovingly, painfully and vehemently pays her a just and moving homage.”

WHO’S WHO

Geralyn Horton is a playwright, director, and actor. Her writing career high point may have been the summer of 1990, when her play set in a Boston abortion clinic, Under Siege (aka Choices) was picked for the Sundance Lab, and she rubbed shoulders with Robert Redford and the “emerging” Tony Kushner. Her acting high points include an abundance of premieres. Besides the American premieres of Rona Munro's Bold Girls, Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan and Liz Lockhead's Perfect Days, all at the Sugan Theatre, she has appeared in dozens of new plays written by colleagues-- including an appearance at NYC’s La Mama in It Doesn’t Take a Tornado, which, like Martha Mitchell, was written specifically for her by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro. Dozens of Horton's own play scripts are available on her web site at <www.stagepage.info>. She has had productions of her work in England, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Greece, New Zealand, India, and South Africa; and in US high schools and colleges.

Joan Faber, singer and pianist of many years' performance in musical theatre and cabaret, started out in the very active folk scene in Columbus Ohio. She moved to Boston and for 10 years was part of the folk trio CLEARING. For 2 years (seemed longer) she was in the political-comedy musical act 'The Lovely Jack Cole and Joan Faber.' In the mid 70's she returned to her musical roots - that is, the witty and elegant songs of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and the Gershwins. She has a repertoire of several hundred songs and has had a long career singing at (among others) the Commander, the Casablanca and Giannino in Cambridge, and in Boston, Diamond Jims', the Lafayette, 111 Dartmouth and The Theatre Lobby. She has no records to sell, but does have a terrific business card.

June Lewin has worked professionally as an actor and director in the Greater Boston theatre since 1986. She particularly enjoys performing, directing and developing new plays. She has worked on a number of scripts by Rosanna Alfaro, including directing the original production of Martha Mitchell for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She has toured with a pantomime company from Poland and taught at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut; she has appeared with the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven and on stages in New York City, Long Island, Berkeley, California, and throughout New England. Since 1988 June has been a member of the board of StageSource, the Alliance of Theatre Artists and Producers of Greater Boston.

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro is a short story writer and playwright. Her plays include Behind Enemy Lines (Pan Asian Repertory in New York), Mishima (East West Players in Los Angeles), Matters of Life and Death (Theater Redux in Cambridge), Barrancas (the Magic Theater in San Francisco), Pablo and Cleopatra (the New Theatre in Boston), and Amsterdam and It Doesn’t Take a Tornado (both at La MaMa in New York). Her short plays have appeared in the Boston Woman on Top Festival, the Boston Theater Marathon and the Playwrights Platform Festival. She was co-producer and writer of the documentary, Asian American Women: A Sense of Place, directed by Leita Luchetti and produced by PBS in Seattle.

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