Elizabeth Whitney

From Faust

Coming home to be as Queer as Faust

The Mickee Faust Club presents: Elizabeth Whitney in "A Day Without Sunshine"

Queer as Faust Festival events 2008

May 30-31 & June 6-7: "Queer as Faust", Mickee Faust Cabarette June 8-15: Pride Week in Tallahassee June 20: "An Evening with Faust and Elizabeth Whitney" June 21: "A Day Without Sunshine" June 27: Movie: "Brother to Brother" June 28: Movie: For the Bible Tells Me So All shows start at 8pm, at the Mickee Faust Clubhouse. Tickets: Queer As Faust cabaret & the Elizabeth Whitney shows: $15 general admission $10 for students, seniors, and persons with disabilities. “Brother to Brother” $5 admission charge. "For the Bible Tells Me So" Free; donations for Fairness For All Families accepted. Festival passes: (20-percent discount) $40 general admission $28 for students, seniors and persons with disabilities. Tickets for all the events go on sale at the Mickee Faust Clubhouse: Monday-Thursday May 26-29th from 4-6PM.

Tallahassee—Florida, 1977. The road to Damascus is paved with orange pulp as Anita Bryant, the Florida Citrus spokeswoman, sings campy songs of salvation, and the children are finally saved…or are they? That’s the question to ponder in “A Day Without Sunshine”, a one-woman show written and performed by Elizabeth Whitney and directed by Mark Finley.

Elizabeth Whitney

Whitney, a 1989 Lincoln High School graduate and musical theatre major at Florida State University, makes her return home for a weekend of satire at the Mickee Faust Clubhouse, 623 McDonnell Drive, June 20-21 at 8PM. Her appearance is part of the company’s “Queer As Faust” festival during Gay Pride month.

Elizabeth Whitney’s acting roots in Tallahassee run deep.

“My parents were very supportive of me doing theatre,” Whitney says. She was enrolled in Young Actors Theater throughout middle and high school and participated in Lincoln High School’s chorus as well as performing every year in the annual musical.

“Young Actors really was my second home and shaped my desires to do performance as a career,” she says.

The Tallahassee native has done well with her career. She holds a doctorate in Performance Studies in from Southern Illinois University, and tours performance work about gender, sexuality and popular culture. She has won honors as Best Solo Performer at the Columbus (OH) National Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival in 2004 and 2006 as well as Curve Magazine’s Lesbian Theatre Awards in 2005 and 2006. Currently, she is a Scholar in Residence in the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston.

An Evening with Faust and Elizabeth Whitney

Whitney plans two different shows during her weekend appearance at the Clubhouse. On Friday, June 20th, she and her partner, Lea Robinson, take to the stage with Faustkateers for “An Evening with Faust and Elizabeth Whitney”. This mini-cabaret features Whitney’s take on Barbie, as well as her and Robinson’s “Bitches with Barrettes” routine, and some of the Faust company’s award-winning videos and whacky skits.

A Day Without Sunshine

On Saturday, June 21st, Whitney performs “A Day Without Sunshine”, one of her new performance pieces and focused on the anti-gay Save Our Children campaign waged in 1977 by beauty queen Anita Bryant in Dade County. Bryant’s triumph for what she termed “the normal majority” repealed a section of the county’s human rights ordinance protecting the LGBT-community from discrimination, and re-ignited the political fire in the belly of the nation’s gay population. The ordinance was only recently amended to include sexual orientation as a protected class, and Florida still prohibits same-sex couples from adopting children, another law passed during the hey-day of Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign.

To schedule an interview with Elizabeth Whitney, call (413) 346-7091 or email her at mailto:melismo@msn.com. More information is on her website.