EST/Sloan Project presents a Reading of
The Letters of Galileo’s Daughter
written by Jessica Dickey
A playwright searches for the surviving letters between Galileo and his eldest daughter. Expanding across time, this story is an exploration of faith, forgiveness, and the cost of heeding one’s truth.
JESSICA DICKEY is an award-winning playwright whose writing was hailed by the New York Times as having “freshness, economy, cheeky vulgarity, with a fine measure of poetic insight”, and the New Yorker magazine as “funny, smart, deep and sad”. Her most recent play, The Convent, a dark comedy about a group of women who try to live like nuns in the middle ages, premiered Off-Broadway this year in a sold-out co-production with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Rising Phoenix and WeatherVane, and is now being developed into a series for Sarah Jessica Parker’s company Pretty Matches. Jessie’s play The Rembrandt (about a museum guard who decides to deliberately touch a Rembrandt painting) had a sold-out run at Steppenwolf starring John Mahoney. Other plays have been premiered Off-Broadway in New York and produced around the country -- The Amish Project, about the 2006 Nickel Mines school shooting in an Amish community; then Charles Ives Take Me Home, about a violinist father and his basketball star daughter; and Row After Row, a dark comedy about Civil War re-enactors. In television, Jessie is also developing a show with Tom McCarthy’s company, Slow Pony. Her next world premiere is coming up this season on the west coast: Nan and the Lower Body is a dark comedy about the creation of the Pap Smear and her maternal grandmother (commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club and the Sloan Foundation). Jessie is a member of the exclusive New Dramatists and a recipient of the prestigious Stavis Award. www.jessicadickey.com
The Letters of Galileo’s Daughter is part of this season's First Light Festival, learn more about the festival and other plays like this here.