LA ALERT!: Kitty's back in a moving social play, "Ladyhouse Blues"

One of the founding aims of TREKLAND: The Blog! was to keep up with what other projects the far-flung Trek family has gone on to, both before the camera and behind it—or, back in the realm of live performance, both on stage and backstage.

Kitty Swink and husband Armin Shimerman have been among those here in our pages who have been happy to share a current project, so I'm happy to help Kitty wrap up the current run of a powerful play in L.A. she shared with us, Kevin O'Morrison's 1979 "Ladyhouse Blues." This Andak Theatre production ends next weekend, March 24, with 8 p.m. shows Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. matinees Saturday and Sunday—all at the small-house NewPlace Studio Theatre in North Hollywood. All the ticket and performance info you need is here.

Kitty plays Liz (in center at left), the widowed matriarch of four daughters who live in a  man-less 1919 St. Louis tenement dubbed a "ladyhouse," so named for the missing husbands and sons gone to war typical of urban areas during and right after World War I . The LA Times had a great interview with Kitty, where she joked to me "managed to talk more about Star Trek than the play." Kitty, of course, played twice on DS9: as Bajoran Minister Rozahn in "Sanctuary" (below right) and as a Vorta, Luaran, in "Tacking Into the Wind."



She has the only Trek connection in the all-female cast of "Ladyhouse Blues," although Antak co-founder Dakin Matthews did play Janeway mentor Admiral Patterson in Voyager's "Relativity."

This is your final chance weekend to catch "Ladyhouse Blues," so catch one of the last four performances, will you? It's a great revival of the 1976 play and and covers so many levels: rural to urban migration, labor activism, women's roles in transition—plus the never-ending crap of bureaucracy and poltics....all from the standpoint of a strong woman raising more just like her, in a time of great social upheaval.