LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ -- Stage, film, and television actress Sarah Melici will add Rider University to her list of performance venues when she shares the powerful message of the life of Dorothy Day through her one-woman play, Fool for Christ.

The one hour production will be held on Tuesday, March 23, at 7:30 p.m. in Gill Memorial Chapel on the University's Lawrenceville campus. The program is being sponsored by Rider's Campus Ministries.

Dorothy Day, who died in 1980 at the age of 83, was considered "the most influential, interesting, and significant figure in the history of American Catholicism," according to Robert Ellsberg in his book, All Saints. After a bohemian youth, Day experienced a religious conversion and encouraged others to follow the path that she had chosen to take.

Fool for Christ was written by New York playwright Donald Yonker at the urging of Melici, and the resulting work has moved audiences to remark that it changed their lives. The performance begins with the 75-year-old Day in jail for picketing with Cesar Chavez and the California grape growers. While there, she reflects on some of the incidents and people in her life.

With a change of voice, a gesture, or a particular stance, Melici becomes the many characters in Day's life, and explores her loves, spirituality, and politics. Melici also dramatizes Day's relationship with Peter Maurin, with whom Day started the Catholic Worker Newspaper, which still sells for a penny per copy. Their activities later grew into the Catholic Worker Movement.

Melici's stage credits include: Vaclav Havel's Temptation at the New York Shakespeare Festival and Gin Game at New Brunswick's George Street Playhouse. She has also appeared up and down the eastern seaboard in productions of Agnes of God, Steel Magnolias, Songs from Distant Lands, Last Love, Joe Egg, and Adam.

Among her prime time television credits are roles on Law and Order and The Golden Girls. She also appeared in the Woody Allen film Stardust Memories.

Rider University's Lawrenceville campus is located five miles south of Princeton and three miles north of Trenton on Route 206 in Lawrence Township, NJ. The campus is one-half mile south of exit 7A of Interstate 95.