Professional actors will read Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence Cheri Magid’s play The Gaba Girl on Tuesday, April 5, at 7:30 PM in the Tennessee Williams Center’s black box theatre on the campus of the University of the South. The event is free and open to the public.

The play will be directed by T. Ryder Smith and read by actors Nigel De Friez and Libby Matthews. It is based on the fantastic but true story of Lester Gaba and his famous mannequin Cynthia. In 1937 Lester, a young soap carver, meets an infamous socialite and finds himself attracted to her best friend, an androgynous and closeted theatre director with dreams of going to Hollywood. To avoid his growing homosexual feelings for the director, Lester creates a life-sized mannequin that looks exactly like the socialite. Questions of what is real and what is not reach dizzying heights—until they don’t. 

Cheri Magid was a 2013-14 Audrey Resident at New Georges, a 2014 Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and is a member of the Dorothy Strelsin Writers Group at Primary Stages. Lydia, or the Girl at the Wheel, Magid’s radio play about the earliest days of burlesque, aired on National Public Radio and her short story “Yeah, We Got That” was featured on Playboy Radio. She wrote the screenplay Story of D, about the real story behind the writing of the famous sadomasochistic novel Story of O, for Nicole Kidman, and she currently writes on the Emmy-Award-winning kids’ show Arthur. She is also the Area Head of Craft and Text at New York University’s Dramatic Writing Program, where she is on faculty.

This event is funded by the Mellon Globalization Forum, the NYU Dean’s Grant, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and "Why All the Fuss about the Body?": An Interdisciplinary Conference on Local and Global/ized Bodies.