The Unadorned
Award winning play (Italy and Ireland) USA PREMIERE
Written by Jodi L. Schenck
Produced by David Danino

Directed by David Danino
July 14th – July 30th 2006
Cast:
Ellie Araiza, Bina Chauhan, Jessica Green, Victoire Michel and Susie Thomas.

As the First World War rages throughout Europe and mighty armies decide the fate of the world, five women struggle to do what they can in the flickering gaslight of a tiny nurse’s station somewhere in wartime London. Together they face the very personal triumphs and tragedies that war brings to those who must stay behind…to the sisters, wives and mothers who can only watch and worry from behind the lines.
This is the portrait painted by The Unadorned, a play in three acts by Jodi L. Schenck. Five disparate women, from different worlds, forced to work together to save what lives they can as they tend soldiers so wounded they had to be sent back to London for treatment. Lilla, an English lady of wealth and breeding whose bitterness towards the war is only matched by her dissatisfaction with her own life…and the secret she keeps; Francie, the brash American who offered her services as a way to live life to the fullest; Minette, a Belgian opera star who may never see her husband and child again, lost somewhere in the heart of the war; Candace, a working-class London girl who is watching the world, and her place in it, change before her very eyes…and watching over them all, the indomitable Miss Ashe, forbidding veteran of several wars who strives to make those girls into “women they can be proud of.”
The Unadorned is a play of soaring power and gentle humor, a play about women at war and peace, dealing with one another and the men in their lives. As the audience lives through the war with these five women, they see the effect that the history-making events of World War I had on the day-to-day lives of regular people. It is their story, as well as the story of the birth of the modern woman’s movement. The Unadorned is powerful, relevant history…and exceptional theater.