Impertinent Girls: Teenage Writings of Jane Austen at Door Kinetic Arts Festival Sept 26th

Impertinent Girls: The Teenage Writings of Jane Austen 

A new play adapted and written by Aretha Sills

Join us for a staged reading at the 2025 Door Kinetic Arts Festival

Friday, September 26th, 1:00 p.m.

Kress Pavilion

7845 Church St.

Egg Harbor, WI

Learn more and find tickets at www.doorkinetic.com

It’s 1789, and fourteen-year-old Jane Austen, her bookish siblings, and their glamorous cousin (who is fleeing the French Revolution) are rehearsing a “family theatrical” in the barn, but for the first time they’re performing young Jane’s own writing. Impertinent Girls: The Teenage Writings of Jane Austen is a hybrid Story Theater adaptation of the raucous and hilarious stories that the precocious author wrote between the ages of twelve and seventeen, ruthlessly parodying the sentimental fiction of her day. Her ridiculous and ill-behaved characters get drunk, gamble, raise armies, and murder each other – a far cry from the novels that would earn her immortality. As the Austens rehearse the farcical burlesques, Jane finds her literary voice. Impertinent Girls explores how a young Jane Austen gained the courage to protect her ferocious gift from a society designed to take it from her.

The staged reading will be co-directed by Rebecca Stone Thornberry and Aretha Sills and performed by students from the UWGB Theatre Department

Learn more about the reading, the full week of DKAF performances, and find tickets at www.doorkinetic.com

Aretha Sills is a writer, director, and teacher of improvisational theater. She studied the theater games of Viola Spolin with her father, director Paul Sills (creator/director of The Second City and Story Theater) and has conducted workshops for Paul Sills’ Wisconsin Theater Game Center, Bard College, Stella Adler Studio of Acting, Sarah Lawrence College, Teatro a Molla, and Northwestern University. She created and directs an interactive show currently touring Los Angeles public schools. She and her father loved talking about Jane Austen’s novels, and she is thrilled to be sharing the first reading of her hybrid Story Theater adaptation of “Impertinent Girls: The Teenage Writings of Jane Austen” in his chosen home of Door County. Aretha lives in Sister Bay with her family.