DOROTHY LANE: a travelogue, written and performed by Associate Professor of Performance Louise Smith ’77, will be presented on Thursday, April 2, at 6:30 PM and Saturday, April 4, at 3 PM at the Dayton Metro Library, Suzie Bassani Theater 215 East Third Street, Dayton Ohio. Admission is free but seating is limited.
Reservations can be made by registering through the links below:
DOROTHY LANE chronicles a year in the life of a mental health therapist working in Dayton, Ohio in 2008, the year of the great recession. The performance 
explores the relationship between the vulnerability of people with serious mental illness and a city in the midst of difficult economic times, with little hope of recovery in sight. Lizzie Olesker, directed and consulted on the script. Migiwa Orimo designed the set and promotional materials.
Smith began writing DOROTHY LANE in 2009. When Antioch College closed, Smith worked for three years as a community mental health therapist in Dayton and Springfield. She initially thought the material was a work of creative non-fiction but later realized that it was better suited as a performance. She received a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist’s Excellence Award in Playwriting after submitting the script. She further developed the work in a residency at Vermont Studio Center for two weeks in 2016 where she completed a first draft. Smith presented DOROTHY LANE for three performances at the Foundry Theater at Antioch College in May 2019.
Smith started making solo performances in 1984 when her first solo SMALL WHITE HOUSE premiered at Baca Downtown in Brooklyn. Since that time she has created over 15 original works that were presented at LaMama, ETC., PS 122, St. Mark’s Danspace, Dance Theater Workshop and Dixon Place in NYC, as well as Actor’s Theater Louisville, Theatre X-Milwaukee, Illusion Theater-Minneapolis, Time/Arts Cincinnati and the Festival de Teatro Internacional in San Salvador.
Since coming to Antioch to teach in 1994, she regularly presents her work at Antioch College and ,when the college closed, was frequently performing at the Nonstop Institute for Liberal Arts. She is the recipient of two OAC Individual Artist Excellence Awards, a Jerome Fellowship in Playwriting and a National Endowment for the Arts Collaborative Artist’s Fellowship with Ping Chong. She was the head of the theater department at Antioch College from 1994-2008, Dean of Community Life from 2011-2014, and is currently Associate Professor of Performance.
Lizzie Olesker is a playwright, performer, and director based in Brooklyn New York whose hybrid work has been developed and presented in New York at the Public Theater, Cherry Lane, Clubbed Thumb, Sightlines Theater and in Seattle at ACT and Intiman. Collaborations include the multi-media, site-specific Every Fold Matters (w/award-winning, documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs) in neighborhood laundromats around the city; and Tiny Lights: Infinite Miniature (w/ Lenora Champagne) at the Ohio Theater, Dixon Place, and Invisible Dog. She began writing for theater with the Winter Project directed by Joseph Chaikin at La Mama and has also worked with the Talking Band (New Cities; The Necklace; Obskene), touring internationally. Most recently, her film with Lynn Sachs The Washing Society has been presented at film festivals nationally and internationally including BAM, Indie Memphis, Athens International Film Festival and Black Maria where it won the jury’s Stellar Award. Olesker teaches at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and the New School for Social Research in NYC. An Antioch alum from 1978, she directed two of Smith’s previous solo works: WHITE /MAN/ FEVER and THE HOUSE OF THE MIGHTY MOTHER THAT TRAVELLED ACROSS THE SKY.
Migiwa Orimo is an artist whose primary work takes the form of installation. Orimo was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. After receiving her degree in literature and studying graphic design, she immigrated to the US in the early eighties. She exhibits her work nationally; her work has been shown extensively in Ohio and around the USA — the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, Headlands Art Center, CA, San Bernadino Museum, CA, the Richman Gallery, Baltimore, MD, and in Ohio, the Springfield Art Museum, Dayton Art Institute, OSU’s Urban Arts Space, Riffe Gallery (Columbus), Oberlin College’s Baron Gallery, and SPACES Gallery (Cleveland). A four-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship/Individual Creativity Excellence Award for her interdisciplinary art projects, she was awarded to the Headlands Art Center Residency Program in 2012 and SPACES Gallery’s SPACES World Artist Project in 2014. Orimo lives and works in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
