THEATRE + COMEDY

Country Playhouse and playwright Fernando Dovalina present a free play reading, Sunday, March 1, at 7pm.  In The Comfort of Anger, a feisty Latina novelist clashes with her demon, in this new play by Houstonian Dovalina.

At 50 plus, smart and sassy Dalia Rios has the good life: a couple of best-selling novels, a younger, hunky boyfriend who makes other women instantly jealous, and a great idea for her first non-fiction book, yet she finds herself suddenly unable to stop reliving an old trauma.

The ghosts that she thought she had long buried haunt her days and nights, endangering her mental health, her relationship and her hopes for her new book.

For a fiercely independent woman of the 21st Century, counseling would just be an admission of weakness, even failure. Yet, she seems to have nowhere else to turn.

As Daliaʼs dreams and nightmares collide with the tactics of her unconventional therapist, she yearns for the easy solutions that her therapist canʼt provide. Their confrontations create sparks, and laughter, too, but eventually they also bring the power she needs for the inevitable face-off with her demons.

Take a trip with this snappy and very creative woman on her turbulent journey to self-discovery, on Sunday night, March 1, at 7 p.m., when Houston writer Fernando Dovalina's play, The Comfort of Anger, is performed in a concert reading at The Country Playhouse.

The public is invited to this free event.

The reading is directed by Lidia Porto and stars Dolly Fischer, Anthony Hernandez, Dan DeLeon and Jada August. Eric James will read directions.

Dovalina (pictured) has tackled dramas, comedies, musicals and childrenʼs plays and many subjects: televangelism (The Gospel According to Tammy Faye), dysfunctional marriages (The Man in the Trunk), small struggling theaters in the world of politics (Burning Bushes), gays in the military (American Homefront) and Hispanic life in America (Meskins: Cycle of Life, Love and Death). Meskins won second prize last year in the Nuestras Voces national playwriting competition in New York.