By: Jillian Kalonick , TimeOFF

The Genesis Festival of New Voices returns to Crossroads Theatre Company.

The answer to that familiar icebreaker question — if you could have dinner with anyone from history, living or dead, who would it be? — has long been an easy one for playwright Kathleen McGhee-Anderson.
In her work-in-progress, The Irresistible Death Club, four famous women take one more trip to earth before moving on to heaven. The spirits of singer Maria Callas, writer Zora Neale Hurston, artist Frida Kahlo and playwright Lillian Hellman travel to mystical Machu Picchu for an other-worldly tour.
“It combines the life stories of women who have long been icons for me in their different artistic endeavors,” says Ms. McGhee-Anderson, speaking from her home in Venice, Calif. “I have wonderful voices because I’ve read about them extensively. I’m letting them talk to me… I’m using them as role models.”
The Irresistible Death Club will have its premiere as a staged reading at Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick at its 12th Genesis Festival of New Voices, April 8-10. Also featured will be Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj’s Union Square and Linda Nieves-Powell’s Yo Soy Latina! After a five-year hiatus, the Genesis Festival is returning to Crossroads, with the goal of fostering playwrights and giving them the opportunity to gain feedback on works-in-progress. Ms. McGhee-Anderson’s play will be finished less than a month before the reading.
“It’s such a great opportunity to finish a work and be given those signposts early on,” she says. “The Genesis Festival gives a writer a chance to go back and redo it. A play is not written to be read, but you have to have an audience to see if it works that magic.”
The setting for The Irresistible Death Club was inspired by Ms. McGhee-Anderson’s own trip to Machu Picchu this past holiday season. “I was impressed and fascinated and enthralled, but I didn’t think it would manifest itself in my work quite so soon,” she says.
It seemed a perfect pilgrimage for the four characters in the play — “It exists as a spiritual destination for many people, there’s a quest for understanding,” says Ms. McGhee Anderson. She chose the women not only because of their iconic status, but also because they all had relationships with men that influenced their artistic lives. Hurston’s was with Langston Hughes (though theirs was not a romantic one), Kahlo was with Diego Rivera, Hellman with Dashiell Hammett, and Callas with Aristotle Onassis.
Ms. McGhee-Anderson’s play Oak and Ivy, at Crossroads in 1992, also chronicled a creative partnership, between poets Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore. “I’ve returned to looking at that artistic relationship between two strong artists, one male and one female, and how they conflicted and combined,” she says.