from OHIO – the limbo project

The Limbo Project began last spring, after the Roman Catholic Church officially declared that Limbo, where the souls of unbaptized infants were thought to spend eternity, has never existed. Members of the International Centre for Women Playwrights were invited to submit short plays that dealt with Limbo which the writers were invited to define in any way they chose for production and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, which includes the International Centres archives in its collections (along with manuscripts of several hundred plays by ICWP members), took over the project. Other writers were invited to participate; there are now some sixty ten-minute plays in the project, all of which are being given staged readings in various locations over the next several months. The project is dedicated to St. Gregory of Nazantius, who first articulated the idea of Limbo in the late 4th century of the common era, assuming that a divine being couldn’t possibly send unbaptized infants, all innocents, to eternal damnation as was Christian teaching.

Readings of Limbo Plays (in groups of five) have now taken place or are scheduled at Gallery 202 in Westerville, Ohio; at the Ohio State University’s Department of Theatre, Cleveland State University, Elizabethtown College (Lancaster, Pennsylvania), and Ohio Dominican University in Columbus. More information about the Limbo Play Project is available at http://limboplays.blogspot.com.