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Yoga Bitch kicks off July's Solo Series @ TheaterWorks
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Morrison in the London production of Yoga Bitch. Photo: Lizzy Brown
This Thursday, Suzanne Morrison’s Yoga Bitch, kicks off four consecutive solo shows at TheaterWorks. The play is the actor/writer’s personal narrative of a two-month yoga retreat in Bali, where she was exposed to highly unusual practices, became disillusioned by her master teacher, and had to redefine her own spirituality.
Morrison is a Seattle native who had a stint in New York City, and has performed Yoga Bitch in New York, Seattle, and London, where the London Evening Standard called it “A lot of fun,” and said she gave an “assured performance, capturing humor…and delivering an excellent physical performance.” She graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Theater and Comparative Literature, and started practicing yoga after graduation. She says yoga offered her serenity, and a way to unpack the bags her Catholic roots filled with “guilt and repression, and a fixation on how a woman’s sexuality was sinful.”
In between relocating from Seattle to New York, she went on the Bali retreat with her respected and trusted yoga mentor. “I wanted to be like her,” Morrison says, “as tall, as beautiful and as serene.” But when she finally saw her teacher’s humanness in her attitudes and unusual practices that included drinking her own urine for breakfast, Morrison needed to reevaluate her relationship to her mentor and her yoga. In Bali Morrison learned it was up to her to find what she thought her teacher could give her. Bali turned out to be an empowering lesson in self sufficiency.
Morrison believes personal narrative solo shows can invigorate the theater, because audiences get to see how people, who aren’t normally portrayed as leading characters, live their lives today. “You feel like you’ve been on a journey with them,” she says. “You’ve experienced something from their perspective.”
Yoga Bitch gives the yogi, the writer, and the actor a place to crack their jokes, air their grievances, contradictions, and worth, while they search for a way to cohabitate.
Morrison is currently writing Yoga Bitch as a memoir that will be published by Broadway Books.
The Skinny:
What: Yoga Bitch
Who: Written and Performed by Suzanne Morrison
Where: TheaterWorks (2085 Monroe Ave)
When: July 9-12 Thurs – Sat@8pm, Sun@2pm
How: 901-726-4656 or get tickets at the box office
Upcoming solo shows at TheaterWorks:
Entertainer’s Eulogy by Darian Dauchan July 19-16
All God’s Creatures by David Prete (that’s me) July 23-26
Project Paul by Jonathon Roberts July 30-Aug 2
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