Pinky Swear Productions presents Killing Women by Marisa Wegrzyn

After gaining a reputation for raucous cabaret and staging works about subversive holidays and carnival freak shows, 2011 Capital Fringe Festival winners Pinky Swear Productions have chosen to tackle playwright Marisa Wegrzyn's sharp-edged black comedy about female assassins - Killing Women - as their next production for DC-area audiences.

The edginess of Killing Women is fueled not from its location of three women in the cutthroat world of hired assassins - though that does create a myriad of comic possibilities. Rather, the play's energy and subversion is driven by Wegrzyn's acidic and deeply-felt portrait of contemporary American culture: the ambitious politics of its workplaces and the complexities and trials of single motherhood and family.

Director Jessica Aimone says "On the surface, this play is about assassins and work culture. At its core, Killing Women is about a person (Abby, played by Pinky Swear co-artistic director Allyson Harkey) who opens herself up to love. Abby transitions from one unsatisfying and highly dysfunctional work family to a family of people who value her on a completely different level."

Killing Women is another big step in Pinky Swear Production's growth as a local company that's fulfilling its core mission of expanding opportunities for women in DC's theatre community. Lange says that "we're not interested in gender bending casting just to hire more women. We're not only doing plays that have female characters. What we are doing is selecting plays that focus on women and their stories - especially the ones that don't involve only babies and boyfriends. There's a whole world of women's experiences open to us, so we're taking the less traveled path in hopes of making it well-trod."