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Eliza Jane Schneider, a former voice actress on the TV show “South Park” and current member of the musical group “Eliza Jane and the Barnyard Gypsies,” will make an appearance on the Western Washington University campus today, Jan. 22, to perform a staged reading of her 30-plus-character solo play “Freedom of Speech.”

Schneider’s critically acclaimed “Freedom of Speech” is a solo story that takes the audience on her journey through the kitchenettes and hearts of America. The show includes Arizona polygamists, Arkansas fiddlers, Pittsburgh street rappers and New Orleans midnight arias. Schneider takes the audience on her own wild ride from Arizona to Alabama to Alaska, stopping off in beauty parlors, swimming holes, bars, street corners, and churches, asking everyone she met, simply, “What’s going on?” For her research, Schneider acquired a second-hand ambulance and crisscrossed the country in a 317,000-mile odyssey, conducting more 1,000 interviews. More information on the show is available at http://www.elizaschneider.com/freedom.html.

The performance, which is free and open to the public, takes place at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 22 in the Old Main Theater.

The performance will be followed by a question-and-answer session about dialectology and documentary theater.

This event is sponsored by the �������� Office of Undergraduate Education, the �������� English Department and the �������� Linguistics Program.

For more information on this event, contact Kaveh Askari, an assistant professor of English at ��������, at (360) 650-7347 or kaveh.askari@wwu.edu.