{"id":26698,"date":"2025-04-18T09:27:54","date_gmt":"2025-04-18T13:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/?p=26698"},"modified":"2025-04-18T09:27:55","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T13:27:55","slug":"comedy-at-carysbrook-with-dirty-barbie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/2025\/04\/comedy-at-carysbrook-with-dirty-barbie\/","title":{"rendered":"Comedy at Carysbrook with Dirty Barbie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Page H. Gifford
Correspondent<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On April 26, at 7 p.m., Carysbrook Performing Arts Center will present Dirty Barbie, a one-woman show written and performed by Denise Stewart. It is a raw, spicy, hilarious expose of her personal journey through life. As Stewart uncovers her vulnerability with humor and finesse, the audience begins to see part of themselves in her performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stewart’s background as a theater artist, speaker, and executive coach helps her to be fearless on stage and easily express herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all intertwined. My training and experience in theater informs my coaching and teaching, and daily life informs my comedy\u201d she said. This past March, along with her comic partner, Mendy St. Ours, they co-produced No Country for Funny Women at Live Arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She has a BA in theater from Catawba College and an MFA in play writing from UVA. She has been a lecturer at UVA for 11 years, in the drama department for eight years, and currently at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy where she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in public speaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been a TEDx speaker and a coach for TEDx speakers, which I love\u2014it lets me mix my theater roots with my coaching work in a meaningful way,\u201d she said. Stewart has spoken to various groups and organizations and is a professional stage actor. Her TV pilot  Adjuncts, was a finalist for the 2017 Virginia Film Award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She wrote and started performing Dirty Barbie and Other Girlhood Tales in 2010. She has many side hustles, most of them artistic and it was in 2009 at the Lee Street Theater in Salisbury, N.C that Dirty Barbie began to sprout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey reached out to ask me if I had any new work that I\u2019d like to propose for their season. I didn\u2019t at the time, but I jumped at the chance to create something they were interested in staging,\u201d she said. \u201cIt felt like a good time to convert blog posts and stories I\u2019d previously written about my childhood into a one-woman show. One of the stories was entitled Dirty Barbie and so that ended up being part of the title of the whole show. I had a successful opening run of the show.\u201d This show is a series of true stories and scenes from her life growing up in North Carolina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The show is intended for mature audiences, combining storytelling, stand-up, and physical comedy in a 70-minute format.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGrowing up in a wild family and a small southern town certainly has defined the extremes of my comedy. I have been working on my oral history for years. For this, I wanted to shape my stories into a one-hour wild ride.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For tickets, visit carysbrook.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Page H. GiffordCorrespondent On April 26, at 7 p.m., Carysbrook Performing Arts Center will present Dirty Barbie, a one-woman show written and performed by Denise Stewart. It is a raw, spicy, hilarious expose of her personal journey through life. As Stewart uncovers her vulnerability with humor and finesse, the audience begins to see part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":26686,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26698"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26699,"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26698\/revisions\/26699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fluvannareview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}