Chagrin Falls, an award-winning new drama by Chicago playwright Mia McCullough, has been added to the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival schedule. It will play June 13-30.

        Chagrin Falls was named outstanding play by a young playwright by the American Theatre Critics Association in February. The play is a haunting look at a small town where the main employers are a slaughterhouse and a prison that carries out the death penalty.

        “It's not a comfortable play,” festival artistic director Jasson Minadakis says. “We want people to come into this theater and feel things. We want to engage people's minds and emotions.

        “Chagrin Falls is a sensitive handling of the issues of capital punishment, which has national and regional implications in the (political) climate we're in.

        “This is going to become a hot issue in Ohio, which has just dismantled its electric chair.”

        Says Ms. McCullough, 31: “When I was in school and reading things, I was attracted to the Greeks. They were always tackling enormous issues.

        “I thought, there must be a way to take an enormous issue and make it personal, real, tangible.”

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