Liesl Wilke

STALLED is a play with music, spoken word, and projections, speaking to the multi-layered nature of the lives of women. Set in a bougie building’s executive ladies’ room in Seattle, four very different women, all stuck and searching and ready to find their way forward, collide in small ways as we learn what they’re each hiding from. As the story unfolds, some women connect overtly, others symbolically, as they see each other in themselves and find the courage to tell their respective truths about motherhood, addiction, love, loss and identity.

STALLED grew from an award-winning short story by Liesl Wilke about women in a mall bathroom in New Jersey who all could use someone but have no clue how to reach out (“Stalled Symphony”, Carve Magazine, 2011). The story was developed into a television series pilot set in Seattle, in which the women were (finally) allowed to connect, to be friends, to move forward. A dear friend in LA called Liesl one day and said: “You should adapt this into a musical!” and she said, um, yes! And then mere days later met Andy Marsh, a brilliant composer with film scoring and original songwriting experience galore who’d always wanted to write a musical. They began writing lyrics together for the music Andy composed for the moments in the play when the characters just had to sing. In the summer of 2020, Marilyn Fox of Pacific Residents Theater in Venice, CA directed an online workshop and reading of the play. Songs were played during the reading from prerecorded tracks, and Liesl and Andy collected feedback from friends, writers, musicians and mentors. Liesl began revising the script with Tom Bryant, gifted dramaturg, and she and Andy completed the remaining musical numbers in 2021. A first staged production of STALLED is planned for early 2022 at the Pacific Resident Theater, where these ladies will finally be brought to life!

To learn more about Stalled, click HERE.

Listen to the cast recording: