(JERSEY CITY, NJ) -- Jersey City Theater Center (JCTC) will present a live-streamed staged reading of "The Bluebottles" from South African playwright Deborah Vieyra on Saturday, March 12, at 12:00pm. E.T. The play, directed by Jacquelyn de Villiers, continues JCTC’s spotlight on current South African works as part of Voices International Theatre Festival. 

“The Bluebottles,” written in 2021, follows Betty as she arrives home, and her parents cannot—or will not—let her into the house. Stuck on other sides of a viciously impenetrable security system, the three make a shot in the dark at connection. Amidst disintegrating bodies, violent neighborhood watch patrols, and impassable dongas, they use words to try to find one another. And right beside them, like a wretched parable of their trouble, a complex colony of bluebottles—hopelessly pretending to be just one thing—gets eaten from the inside.

Deborah Vieyra is a writer and performer from South Africa. Now based in Vancouver, she shares the unique inspiration that led her to pen her work. “I stood on the beach near where my parents live and watched a bluebottle being devoured by an infantry of sea slugs. They were eating it from the inside,” says Vieyra. 

“It looked to me like a living x-ray of our social body — of family, of whiteness, of the colonial project, of my country, of all of it. And then the pandemic happened with all its loss — of lives, of social fabrics, of communication between people, of relationships. I wrote this play to navigate disintegration, to try and understand how (or if) to put it all back together. For better or worse, decomposition is a force,” she adds.

The play will be directed by Jacquelyn de Villiers with stage direction by Lindy Mtongana. The cast includes: Alicia McCormick (as Betty), Megan Choritz (as Trudy), Roy Hunter (as Frank), Trent Rowe (as Father Blake)

Tickets ($10) are available for purchase at www.jctcenter.org and www.seetickets.us/jctcenter. Accessibility accommodations for all events include closed captioning. In addition, a transcript can be made available in accessible large print or Braille, and sign language interpretation is also available upon request.

Following "The Bluebottles,” JCTC presents the final staged reading in its South African series with Palesa Mazamisa's "Lazy Boy" on Saturday, May 14 at 12:00pm. E.T. 

Founded in 2006, Jersey City Theater Center is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) arts organization committed to inspiring conversations about important issues of our times through the arts.