The Road To Mecca
February 8 - 24, 2008

Orange Girls Fundraiser
July 17 - 19, 2008

Scorched
September 12 - 28, 2008

Orange Girls bring fresh ideas to theater
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
July 24, 2005

Three performers well known on the midsize-theater scene -- Brooke Edwards, Michelle Hand and Meghan Maguire -- have teamed up to form a new troupe, the Orange Girls.

What a juicy prospect. (Couldn't resist.) Orange Girls debut in October with "Going to See the Elephant," a play about pioneer women in Kansas. The founders are all in the cast, as is Nancy Lewis; Deanna Jent will direct.

With those artists and its unusual authorship by a six-woman team, "Elephant" sets the tone: Orange Girls plan to cultivate a decidedly female voice.

Male artists undoubtedly will participate, Edwards says. But at this theater, men won't be able to assume that most of the good parts belong to them like a birthright.

The Orange Girls take their name from the only job that women could hold in the public theaters of Restoration England: selling oranges. Obviously, things have changed considerably in the last 400 or so years. Onstage and behind it, women have moved well past the fruit stand.

Just on the micro level of the St. Louis theater scene, plenty of women hold or have held positions of authority, among them Donna Parroné of HotCity, Carol North of Metro Theater Company, Donna Northcott of St. Louis Shakespeare, Melanie Dreyer and Seana Manning of Shattermask, Joan Lipkin of That Uppity Theatre Company, Kathleen Sitzer of New Jewish Theatre, Fontaine Syer and Christine Smith of Theatre Project Company, Patton Chiles of Historyonics and Agnes Wilcox of the New Theatre.

The Orange Girls, however, hope to make a female theatrical presence more explicit through their choice of material and through their casting decisions, which will not necessarily be the usual ones.

"I have a list of roles in my head that I want to play before I die, and about half of them are male (roles)," Edwards says. In an era when color-blind casting is common in musical theater and virtually taken for granted on the classical stage, the Orange Girls are eager to explore nontraditional casting along gender lines as well.

After the debut, the troupe plans to mount an outdoor performance of "Medea," Euripides' tragedy of a woman betrayed by her husband; its title character is one of the great roles in the female repertoire. That will be followed by Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," presented with an all-female cast.

The Orange Girls will introduce their fresh ideas at a fundraising party on Aug. 28 at Miso, a restaurant in Clayton.

For more information about the benefit or the troupe, call 314-520-9557. The Web site isn't up yet, but there's a snail-mail address: Orange Girls, P.O. Box 6711, St. Louis, Mo. 63144.