New Work Now

Festival Events:

Programming 2013:

• Monday, September 9 at 7:00pm
  THE BODY OF AN AMERICAN
  By Dan O’Brien
  Directed by Davis McCallum
  
  • With a single, stark photograph, the course of global events is changed forever. In powerful, theatrical language, Dan O’Brien explores the ethical and personal consequences resulting from Paul Watson’s real-life photograph of the body of an American soldier dragged from the wreck of a Blackhawk and mutilated in the streets of Mogadishu. Winner of the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama.
• Tuesday, September 10 at 7:00pm
  PARADISE BLUE
  By Dominique Morisseau
  Directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah
  
  • Detroit’s Blackbottom neighborhood. 1949. An old jazz spot and rooming house stays alive by its resident bebop band. Headed by troubled trumpeter and club owner Blue, the band and business struggle to stay afloat in face of the city’s urban renewal plans to uproot Blackbottom. But when a mysterious woman comes along with her own money and a walk that drives men crazy, no one is prepared for how far she’ll go to change the plans. PARADISE BLUE is the first part of Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit Trilogy, which includes the recent Public Lab/Classical Theatre of Harlem co-production of Detroit ’67.
• Wednesday, September 11 at 7:00pm
  NEW WORK THEN: ZERO POSITIVE
  By Harry Kondoleon
  Directed by Sarah Benson
  
  • New York City. 1987. AIDS is a death sentence and Himmer has just gotten the bad news. But the resourceful author isn’t going to wait around to die. He’s going to take his death into his own hands – with a little help from his friends. Originally produced by The Public Theater in 1988, NEW WORK THEN is proud to once again present this searing and fantastical play to a new generation.
• Thursday, September 12 at 7:00pm
  NOTHING LEFT TO BURN
  By Adi Hanash and Patrick Vassel
  Directed by Patrick Vassel
  • “This is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one ends with me setting myself on fire.” So begins Mohamed, the Tunisian fruit-seller who set himself ablaze and began the Arab Spring, as he tells his tale. Mohamed and Fazia meet at the market and a forbidden romance blossoms, but the personal eventually turns political in this romantic comedy that ends in tragedy, though not without hope.
• Saturday, September 14 at 7:00pm
  MANAHATTA
  By Mary Kathryn Nagle
  Directed by Kate Whoriskey
  Co-presented by The Eagle Project
  
  • When a modern day Lenape woman returns to her ancestral land to work on Wall Street, she must reconcile all that her people have lost with what she now attempts to gain. Simultaneously, MANAHATTA also tells the story of the Lenape Indians who lived on the island of Manahatta in the 1600s, when Peter Minuit and the Dutch claim to have purchased the island for $24. Written in The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group, this play explores how the concepts of indigenous identity, ownership, and the entire system of American capitalism have made us who we are today.
• Sunday, September 15 at 7:00pm
  ARTIFICIAL FELLOW TRAVELER
  Written and performed by Ethan Sandler
  Directed by Daniel Goldstein
  
  • Ethan Sandler has carefully (some might say “obsessively”) constructed a survival kit meant to keep his family alive for five days if/when the sh*t hits the fan. Earthquake? Alien Invasion? Zombie Apocalypse? He’s got it covered (or at least he prays he does). ARTIFICIAL FELLOW TRAVELER tells the story of how these five post-apocalyptic days might unfold while exploring questions of fear, paranoia and the possible identity of a second gunman in the JFK assassination.
• Monday, September 16 at 7:00pm
  TUMACHO
  By Ethan Lipton
  Directed by Leigh Silverman
  
  • In a small frontier town in the Old West, the men are dropping like flies at the hands of no good gangster Big Bill Yardley. Orphaned sharpshooter Catalina Vucuvich-Villalobos dreams of taking the murderer down. But when the demon ghost Tumacho rolls back into town, all the rules change. An uproarious tale about cowboys, coyotes, and chronic halitosis. Yeehaw! An inaugural member of The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group, Ethan Lipton is the Obie Award-winning author of No Place to Go. TUMACHO is a commission of Clubbed Thumb, made possible with funding from the New York State Council of the Arts.
• Tuesday, September 17 at 7:00pm
  FALLING APART…TOGETHER
  Written and performed by Kathryn Grody
  Directed by Timothy Near
  
  • In the middle of their lives, two performers find their younger and naïve expectations of a life of domestic bliss and artistic fulfillment challenged by the reality of their marriage, children and careers. In her new solo show, two-time Obie Award-winning actress and writer Kathryn Grody explores how a family can go from idyllic deliciousness to relative catastrophe and yet still manage to survive – bruised and altered, but wiser in the knowledge of the work it takes to make and hold onto a family.
• Wednesday, September 18 at 7:00pm
  HOW TO BE A ROCK CRITIC
  By Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
  Performed by Erik Jensen
  Directed by Jessica Blank
  
  • Outsized, manic, often fucked-up and impossibly creative, Gonzo journalist Lester Bangs was America’s greatest rock critic and a living icon. Both irreligious and messianic about humanity in general and music in particular, Lester traveled with and battled the likes of The Clash, Bob Marley, Lou Reed and the MC5, peeling away the veneer between “star” and audience. But when the ragged, rebel ethos of the 70’s gave way to the corporate pop of the 80’s, Lester lost the myth he’d built a life around, and overdosed at 33. This solo play performed by Jensen and created by the award-winning team behind The Exonerated and Aftermath utilizes Lester’s own writing to chart the life, work and death of one of the 20th century’s most ground-breaking, pioneering voices.
• Thursday, September 19 at 7:00pm
  BARBECUE
  Written and directed by Robert O’Hara
  
  • A pot head, an alcoholic, a pill popper and a control freak. The last four people who should ever perform an intervention decide it’s time for their crack-head sister, Zippity Boom, to get her life together. This hilarious, over-the-top family portrait offers all the pleasures of watching people in a knock-down drag-out fight, but also asks: who’s zooming who? The Obie Award-winning director of In the Continuum, Robert O’Hara recently directed Wild With Happy at The Public.
• Friday, September 20 at 7:00pm
  HAPPYFLOWERNAIL
  Written and performed by Radha Blank
  Directed by Liesl Tommy
  
  • Business is bad for Mrs. Sung. A rival nail salon just opened up down the street. Her best manicurist is nowhere to be found. And her most loyal customer is facing eviction. In a Korean-owned nail salon in the heart of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, the lives of five women intersect in this timely solo-performance play that explores loss, survival, gentrification and the American Dream. Radha Blank was an inaugural member of The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group.

One Day Marathon Saturday, September 21, 2013 at 5:00pm:

• THE BOARDWALK TRILOGY: THE BRIGHTON BEACH BROOKLYN PLAYS
  Presented in Collaboration with Actor’s Touring Company, UK (with Elyse Dodgson, International Director, Royal Court Theatre, London)
  CEC ArtsLink
  
  • In June 2012, three Russian-speaking playwrights went to live in Brighton Beach to explore a world made up of emigrants who fled the former Soviet Union and formed their own community on the Brooklyn shorefront. Mikhail Durnenkov (Russia), Pavel Pryazhko (Belarus) and Natal’ya Vorozhbit (Ukraine) were accompanied by Elyse Dodgson, International Director of the Royal Court Theatre, London who grew up in Brighton Beach; Ramin Gray, Artistic Director of Actors Touring Company, UK; poet and translator Sasha Dugdale; and hosted by The Public Theater. The resulting plays shine startling lights on Brighton Beach, its residents and their attitudes to being both immigrants away from their homeland and new Americans. All from the perspective of those left behind.
• BLACK BODY
  By Mikhail Durnenkov
  Translated by Rory Mullarkey
  Directed by Ramin Gray
  • It’s a normal day in Brighton Beach. Roman works in his hair salon. His father makes a model of the Kremlin from matchsticks. Anna and Mark rehearse for a concert of Silver Age poetry. Then they hear the news: “Russia is gone.” Instead of a country, there’s only a black hole. In this poignant, sci-fi romp, it falls to the Brooklyn shorefront residents of Brighton Beach to preserve Russia – not only its culture and heritage but also its soul.
• EMIGRANTS
  By Pavel Pryazhko
  Translated by Sasha Dugdale
  Directed by Ramin Gray
  
  • Zhenya runs a boarding house in Brighton Beach with some strange foreign visitors: a woman who presents him with a pumpkin pie, a man who Skypes in German, and Kira – who arrived from Russia when she was eight but has no memory of her life before America. They all have problems with keys. From the perspective of his basement room on Neptune Avenue, Pryazhko creates a world of laconic dialogue and surreal imagery in which nothing is what it seems and nothing quite fits.
• PLACE
  By Natal’ya Vorozhbit
  Translated by Sasha Dugdale
  Directed by Sacha Wares
  
  • Paradise for You, Zhanna’s shop selling remnants of the Soviet Union, is a painful reminder of her past: the gangster husband she left in Kiev, his murder by the KGB. It is also her sole means of supporting her disabled mother and her unmarried son Misha. Zhanna is desperate for Misha to marry and provide her with grandchildren, not least because she promised Father Yury that she’d abstain from sex until a grandchild arrives. But when the mysterious Lyonya arrives from Kiev, this promise proves increasingly difficult to keep. A story about one woman and her will to survive.
• Note — The entire development of this project was made possible by the generous support of the Genesis Foundation. Special thanks for the additional support from the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and TMU (Trust for Mutual Understanding).

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Practical Info:

Venue:

• The Public’s Martinson Theater
  425 Lafayette Street
  New York , NY

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