Cropcirclers: A Modern Fable for Us All by Alan Jozwiak will be the first play script to benefit from the new developmental workshop series by Cincinnati Playwrights Initiative.

Following a week of close scrutiny, rewrites and rehearsal, Cropcirclers will have a public reading at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 8 in the black box theater in the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art.

It is, of course, about the making of those mysterious designs that appear in standing crops.

The prolific Jozwiak will get another workshop later this season when his one act Dora: Why Can't You Sit Still? shares a program with Chuck Sambuchino's A Mime Is a Terrible Thing to Waste. That workshop is also scheduled at the Rosenthal Center, on May 3.

Pauline Smolin's The Immie Queen will be part of Ensemble's Theatre of the Mind playreading series in April.

Next up for the Initiative is a Nov. 18 staged reading of Fugitive Slave in the Aronoff's Fifth Third Bank Theater.

The new play is by historian Henry Burke and Dick Croy and based on their novel The River Jordan. At the center of the play-within-a-play is the actual 1843 escape by a female slave and her seven children from an Ohio River tobacco plantation on the Underground Railroad.

Performer's first

Local performance artist Tara Guilfoil debuts her multimedia work Life Excerpt #3 at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Mockbee Building (603 W. McMicken, in the same building as SS NOVA).

Guilfoil uses street jazz, hip-hop, spoken word and film to explore one woman's journey through sexual assault and its aftermath. (And thanks collaborator Lyle Benjamin, filmmakers Roesing Ape and choreographer Natalie Bolan.)

Life Excerpt #3 is a benefit performance (tickets $10) for University of Cincinnati's Women's Center and Women Helping Women.

Jackie Demaline

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com