This reading of the new play Blood/Water/Paint by Seattle-based playwright Joy McCullough-Carranza will be performed on Friday, April 15th. The reading will be in connection and in conversation with Nine, the concurrent production at the University of Pittsburgh main-stage. Both of these plays deal with Italian artists, though Nine is a male-written play that views the story through the lens of a misogynistic film-maker in the 1960s and Blood/Water/Paint is a female-written play about the 17th century painter, Artemisia Gentileschi.

Blood/Water/Paint comments on the idea of the female form in art, both as object and creator. We examine the question of how women have resisted or used their identities to enhance or overcome their professional, personal, or sociological struggles. Both plays also question the idea of “the Italian woman” as seen through the eyes of a male artist. To further this conversation, the play will be directed by a woman (Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, Assistant Professor, Theatre Arts) and feature a local professional actress. The story of Blood/Water/Paint revolves centrally a round Gentileschi’s creation of her most famous paintings, as well as her fierce battle to rise above the most devastating event in her life and fight for justice despite horrific consequences. We believe the questions this play asks are the heart of what it means to be human, or more specifically, what it means to be a creative human.

This event is also sponsored by the Department of Theatre Arts. For more information, please contact Dennis Schebetta at dennis72@pitt.edu.