Fresh Ink Theatre Opens 3rd Season with 'Outlaw Jean'

In a continued effort to develop new, Boston-based work in a collaborative, playwright-centered manner, Fresh Ink Theatre opens their third season with "Outlaw Jean" by MJ Kaufman.

Fresh Ink was born in the summer of 2011 and debuted at the Factory Theatre. Since then, Fresh Ink has presented free staged readings of five plays a season in addition to bringing three of those to full theatrical productions.

A Western-inspired play, "Outlaw Jean" tells the story of a scheming bandit returning to her "bedbug-infested" hometown to confront her family.

"Why does the extreme individual -- the cowboy or the outlaw -- have to be delivered from the ways of sin?" MJ Kaufman asked a reporter for the Yale Daily News in 2011 when "Outlaw Jean" had its premiere performance at the New Haven university. The author is currently an MFA candidate at Yale School of Drama.

This play, which starts out clownish and over the top, like Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" movies and ends more naturalistic, like Sam Shepard's plays, is actually structured in the style of a Greek tragedy.

"I was interested in the figure of the outlaw and how that evolved from the cowboy, and I studied those narratives from early American literature," continued Kaufman, who originally came to the East Coast from Portland, Ore. to attend Wesleyan University. "I read a lot more theory than I did plays, but I looked at Sam Shepard and the French playwright Jean Genet who wrote about outlaws and good and evil. [I also studied] characters like Billy the Kid and novels, films and poetry about outlaws."

A playwriting fellow at the Huntington Theatre, MJ Kaufman has received awards and commissions from the Program for Women in Theater, the Playwrights Foundation, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and Young Playwrights Inc. He was also awarded the 2010 Jane Chambers Prize in Feminist Theatre.

Fresh Ink Theatre Company is committed to developing new works, like "Outlaw Jean," with emerging theatre artists in the New England area. They will produce two more shows this season "Handicapping" by James McLindon and "1 2 3" by Lila Rose Kaplan.

"I hope that [audiences] enjoy themselves," said Kaufman, "that's important when you go the theater -- and I [hope] they reflect [on] their beliefs about individualism and family and how those relate to American values."

Fresh Ink Theatre presents "Outlaw Jean"

Fresh Ink Theatre: freshinktheatre.com
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