Taffety Punk Theatre Co and the Wolf Trap Opera Co will present Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece to raise awareness about violence against women. To open the show, dancer and performer Megan Adrielle and actress Teresa Spencer will be reading from Teresa's online project Too Like the Lightning, a collection of prose love poems written to and inspired by catcallers, followers-on-the-street, and other sundry unsavories:

Juliet says to her Romeo, "I have no joy of this contract tonight. / It is too rash, too unadvised, to sudden; / Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say 'It lightens.'" So, too, are the brief love affairs that spark and fade between dudes hollering on the street and women who are just trying to get to work, goddammit. What to do with these ephemeral loves-that-might-have-been? Satirize them on the internet. Natch.