About the Play:

Talking With... is a full-length dramatic comedy by Jane Martin. What do a baton twirler, an ex-rodeo rider, and an actress have in common? They are just three of the 11 unique women whose lives are explored through their relationships to work, other women, parents, and men. In a time when women's voices need to be heard, Talking With… gives the audience a mix of the comedic and dramatic in an intimate look into the lives of each of these women and their struggle, frustration, joy, and pride being women.

Talking With... features 11 solo pieces for 11 women who talk about their lives in monologues entitled: Fifteen Minutes, Scraps, Clear Glass Marbles, Audition, Rodeo, Twirler, Lamps, Handler, Dragons, French Fries, and Marks. The characters come from all walks of life, including a fading rodeo star; a snake handler; one aspiring actor and one working actor; a fantasizing housewife; a baton-twirler; and more. Some characters have been touched by life (Dragons) and others by death (Clear Glass Marbles). Each monologue is a work that stands alone but also reflects and comments upon the others. Many of them are very touching; a few are even intensely emotional. However, there is also the very comical. Even the funny ones, however, have an underlying depth to them that gives a sensitive insight into each of the characters involved. Talking With is a summation of thoughts, events, actions, memories, hope, defeats, and dreams dramatizing the challenges that all women face in contemporary society. Characters confront the audience directly with revelations that are not simply truthful, but deeply spiritual, hauntingly private, funny, and frighteningly exotic. These extraordinary monologues received a standing ovation at Louisville's Actors Theatre.

Talking With... premiered in 1982 at the famed Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of the annual Festival of New American Plays, an influential showplace for playwrights. Since its off Broadway premiere in 1982 at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) in New York City, it has been performed around the world, winning the Best Foreign Play of the Year award in Germany from Theater Heute magazine. The play puts its female characters front and center and has been performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions

Cast: 11 female

What people say:

"A dramatist with an original voice … [and] gladsome humor." — New York Times

"With Jane Martin, the monologue has taken on a new poetic form, intensive in its method and revelatory in its impact." — Philadelphia Inquirer

"The observations are acute yet delicately sensitive. The reflections are lifelike. The writing is lively, marked by a gift for transforming colloquial language into theatrical speech. The attitude is one of sincere affection. Miss Martin's characters emerge from the anonymity of the American scene. Each is a unique individual, self-identified, odd, idiosyncratic, rooted in a milieu, and distinctively articulate." — The Christian Science Monitor.

About the Playwright:

Jane Martin, apparently from Kentucky, has been referred to as "America's best known, unknown playwright". The name Jane Martin is widely believed to be a pseudonym. She has been nominated for the Pulitzer prize, and won the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award twice. But she has never made any public appearances or spoken about any of her works. Nor has she ever given an interview. No biographical details are known about her. No photographs of Ms. Martin have ever been published.