Pinky Swear’s Mission is to produce modern plays with well-crafted, believable, engaging women’s roles where people talk to each other and things happen. Our productions are a little funny, a little dark, and a lot entertaining.
Our goals are to:
• Build a company in which local theatre artists can make a living in our community.
• Raise the profile of women’s voices in theatre by hiring women artists and technicians whenever possible.
• Enable artists to experiment with new avenues of...
Pinky Swear’s Mission is to produce modern plays with well-crafted, believable, engaging women’s roles where people talk to each other and things happen. Our productions are a little funny, a little dark, and a lot entertaining.
Our goals are to:
• Build a company in which local theatre artists can make a living in our community.
• Raise the profile of women’s voices in theatre by hiring women artists and technicians whenever possible.
• Enable artists to experiment with new avenues of expression.
In 2008, two friends — hungry for opportunities to do the type of theatre they wanted to do — decided there was no good reason not to start a theatre company. They made a promise to do just that and the result was Pinky Swear Productions.
In 2009, Pinky Swear produced the critically acclaimed Freakshow as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. Under the direction of Lise Bruneau, Freakshow was named a Pick of the Fringe by DC Theatre Scene.
In 2010, Pinky Swear decided to expand into cabaret, producing the sold-out Valentine’s Day show Singing Our Hearts Out at the Bethesda Theatre featuring a cast of ten women. DC Theatre Scene called the production “the perfect Valentine’s Day gift” from “some of the most talented women in our area.” Due to the success of that show, City Artistic Partnerships invited Pinky Swear to perform a two-night cabaret for Warehouse Theater’s Warehouse or Bust in May 2010. Pinky Swear returned to the Capital Fringe Festival in July 2010 with Be Here Now, an update and homage to Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
Starting in 2011, Pinky Swear developed a new cabaret series, Cabaret XXX, for the Capital Fringe Festival. These have become festival mainstays, selling out night after night and winning the award for Best Musical in 2011. The first was subtitled Les Femmes Fatales and dealt with breakups. The second, Love the One You’re With, was all about sex. Last 2013’s added a Y chromosome and featured our first male singer with Cabaret XXXY: Who Do You Think You Are? 2014 features the next installment, Break on Through. Catch us at Capital Fringe Festival in July 2014.
Pinky Swear launched its first full season of full-length shows in December, 2011 with Marni Penning’s Carol’s Christmas. We followed that with Marisa Wegrzyn’s Killing Women in April of 2012. In 2013, we had our most active season, beginning with The Unclear Family, a repertory of three plays - Benched, Bleed, and Smudge. These allowed us to feature local women playwrights, Allyson Currin and Renee Calarco (Benched and Bleed, respectively) and introduce DC audiences to a recent work by Rachel Axler. We followed that up with our Cabaret XXXY show for Fringe, and wound the season up with our most successful show to date, Bondage by David Henry Hwang. Bondage, a play about race set in an S&M dungeon by a Tony winning playwright, played to sold out houses at the brand new, woman-owned Anacostia Playhouse in November of 2013.
Our upcoming season includes a new Cabaret for Fringe 2014, a site-specific play in September/October 2014, continuing development and production of Stephen Spotswood’s play, The Last Burlesque (which we debuted at the Kennedy Center Page to Stage Festival in 2013), and devising a new play about women in the online gaming world for the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, a city wide event to be held in October 2015.
We are proud of how far Pinky Swear has come since our upstart beginnings. We look forward to rocking DC for many years to come.