Fanny Kemble Invites You to an Audience

One-Woman Performance spans Shakespeare to Slavery

Two performances only!!

HerStory Productions brings the one-woman production, Shame the Devil! An Audience with Fanny Kemble to Louisville audiences. Megan Burnett will present this dynamic exploration of this 19th century actress and early icon of the anti-slavery movement at The Bard’s Town Theatre on July 31 and August 1 at 7:30p.m. Tickets are $15.00.

Shame the Devil! An Audience with Fanny Kemble uses the one-person show format, a play form that Kemble herself undertook in the 1850’s, to explore the life, theatrical work, and literary endeavors of this idiosyncratic and passionate Englishwoman. A member of the leading family of Shakespearean roles in early 19th century England, Kemble came to this country to tour, and left the stage to marry Pierce Butler. Subsequently discovering his family had large plantation holdings, Kemble found herself living on her husband’s plantation – and face to face with the daily workings of the slave system. Her Journal of a Residence on a Southern Plantation was embraced by the early anti-slavery movement. This script, taking Kemble’s Journal as inspiration, offers a complex glimpse of all these facets of Fanny Kemble’s life, providing performer with an opportunity to become English and American characters, men and women, slave and free, and to embody Shakespeare’s greatest characters.

Director Kathi E.B. Ellis re-unites with Megan Burnett for this second revival of a production that has toured Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina, and Oklahoma. Ellis and Burnett are long-time collaborators, having worked together with the Pleiades Theatre Company (including Eve Ensler’s Necessary Targets and the NEA-funded original work Alice Moments: Echoes, Ripples, and Light) and the ShoeString Productions’ site-specific production of The Glass Menagerie; they are also two of the founding co-principals of StageLab, an acting studio offering ongoing training for theatre artists.

For reservations and additional information about Shame the Devil! An Audience with Fanny Kemble herstoryproductions@yahoo.​com. This production is available for touring. Ask for details!

Artist Information:

Megan Burnett has acted professionally throughout the Commonwealth and the country and has extensive Shakespearean credits as both performer and teaching artist. Burnett currently teaches theatre and public speaking at Alice Lloyd College and is the founding producer/director of the touring Caudill Players, a student acting ensemble, and has directed many main stage productions at the college. She was an English Speaking Union Teacher Scholar studying at Shakespeare's Globe in London, and a participant in the Japan Fulbright Memorial Teacher Fund Project studying the educational system K-College, as well as Kabuki, Noh and Bunraku theatre forms Burnett has also studied with Shakespeare and Company, and has been the voice and text coach for the Josephine Summerstage Shakespeare productions for the past two summers.

Kathi E.B. Ellis is a member of the Lincoln Center and Chicago Directors' Labs and an associate member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. Ellis directs throughout the country, and her work in Florida has been recognized with nominations for the South Florida Regional Theatre Carbonell Award. Regionally she has directed for Kentucky Repertory Theatre, Actors Guild of Lexington, and many Louisville-area theatres, including Actors Theatre of Louisville where she was assistant director to both Susan K. Booth and Seret Scott. Ellis was part of the devising team and director for the Looking for Lilith original work, Fabric, Flames, and Fervor: Girls of the Triangle, which was performed as part of the official events of the Triangle Centennial in New York City in 2011. Most recently she directed the second annual Josephine Summerstage production, a unique venture in which sculpture and Shakespeare are integrated; this year’s production was The Tempest with Mollie Rabiner’s Clarity Vehicle.