‘Anti-suffrage monologue' production honors Women's History Month

NEWTON — In celebration of Women’s History Month, Project Self-Sufficiency will host actress Michele LaRue in her performance of the one-woman show “Someone Must Wash the Dishes: An Anti-Suffrage Monologue.” The production is free and open to the public. “Someone Must Wash the Dishes” is based on the work of Marie Jenney Howe, a pro-suffragist whose satirical work “An Anti-Suffrage Monologue” was published by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, a precursor to the League of Women Voters, in 1913, and was widely performed at suffrage meetings across the country. The current play titled “Someone Must Wash the Dishes,” premiered in March, 1994, during New York City’s Womenkind Festival. The production currently tours under the banner of the East Lynne Theater Company, a theatrical venture founded in 1980 to stage performances of early American plays. The production has been staged at venues as varied as the State Museum in Trenton to the Newberry Library in Chicago. “We are thrilled to be hosting Michele LaRue in her hilarious rendition of ‘Someone Must Wash the Dishes,’” announced Deborah Berry-Toon, executive director of Project Self-Sufficiency. “This performance has particular resonance because it demonstrates the enormous strides achieved by women since the turn of the last century, and also because it will be staged here at Project Self-Sufficiency, an organization which has helped more than 17,000 women since its inception in 1986.” In addition to performing in “Someone Must Wash the Dishes,” Michele LaRue tours nationally with several other one-woman plays including “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which is based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1890 feminist horror story, “Eve’s Diary,” adapted from several stories by Mark Twain, and a dramatization of several American short stories written in the late 1800’s. She has given more than 200 performances of these productions in 12 states, from Maine to Oklahoma. LaRue has also performed extensively on the New York stage, including at New Dramatists, the Actors Studio, the Harold Clurman Theatre, Theatre at St. Clements, the Lark Theatre Company, and others. LaRue belongs to the three major actors’ unions: Actors’ Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild, and AFTRA; and to the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society. Offstage, she is a well-respected theatre writer and editor, and a member of Drama Desk, an organization of New York drama critics. She was married to and collaborated with producer Warren Kliewer, onstage and off, for more than 25 years. The program is offered through the Horizons Speakers Bureau of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. If you go What: “Someone Must Wash the Dishes” Where: 127 Mill Street in Newton When: Tuesday, March 24 at 7 p.m. Actress Michele LaRue