A curious girl who falls down a rabbit hole. The lead singer of an iconic ‘60s rock band. The poor, nameless star of a classic druggie diary. Three oddly connected heroines inhabit three separate worlds, playing out their stories exactly as expected. But when those worlds suddenly collide – really, they collide -- they all start to wonder… who's really controlling my destiny?

Corthron’s imaginary meeting of these three characters is inspired by the ways they historically intertwine. It was Grace Slick’s obsession with the works of Lewis Carroll (and the drug imagery she found therein) which inspired Jefferson Airplane’s hallucinatory 1967 hit White Rabbit, which in turn inspired the title of the best-selling 1971 teenage memoir Go Ask Alice – published as the real diary of an anonymous girl, but later revealed to be a work of fiction, a “cautionary tale” by a do-gooding writer named Beatrice Sparks.

The production is designed to feel like a ‘60s-era "happening," an event which used familiar materials in new ways to make participants question their approach to experience. The concept will extend throughout the ample Irondale space -- including the balcony, where audiences will enter the theater through an interactive installation, which explores the backstory of the three protagonists. There, text from their stories mingles with art-school style constructions; and soundscapes and live video create the sense that everyone is a voyeur.

ALICEGRACEANON was originally commissioned in 2010 as part of The Germ Project. As a response to the growing trend towards small-cast, one-set plays, New Georges commissioned four playwrights to write BIG plays, plays of “scope and adventure” that are “unproduce-able” and that “encompass elements which extend and expand the conventional playwriting repertoire.” In June 2011 they presented a “germ” – a 20-minute excerpt – of each of the plays, at 3LD Art & Technology Center. Kara Lee Corthron’s play AliceGraceAnon is the first of these four original Germ Project plays to receive a fully staged production. 

About the Company: New Georges
New Georges (Susan Bernfield, Artistic Director; Sarah Cameron Sunde, Associate Director) the OBIE-winning theater company founded in 1992 produces highly theatrical new works by women.

It's just the reminder, all adults need, that the treacherous environment of high school was only the opening salvo for the rest of one's life.

Watch, if you dareth, as love and hunger collide most fantastically with the elusive American dream. In hearty games of Dungeons & Dragons, young Bart and Holly escape the dreary reality of hauling money all day in armored transport vehicles. When jobs are lost and the boss starts looking at Holly funny, escape becomes reality, releasing Goldor & Mythyka upon the world! Thusly, lucre shall be heisted!  Throngs shall cheer their criminal exploits!  And Have Nots will rule the day. Until… reality regenerates with a vengeance.

Goldor $ Mythykais based on a truly true story! In 2008, playwright Lynn Rosen read an article she couldn’t get out of her head… A nice young couple enamored of fantasy role-playing games, Roger Dillon and Nicole Boyd, steal $7.4 million from an armored car company in Youngstown, Ohio. By the time they're captured just 350 miles away (in Pipestem, West Virginia), the public has dubbed them the “Goth Bonnie and Clyde.” 

Goldor $ Mythyka was originally commissioned in 2010 as part of The Germ Project. As a response to the growing trend towards small-cast, one-set plays, New Georges commissioned four playwrights to write BIG plays, plays of “scope and adventure” that are “unproduce-able” and that “encompass elements which extend and expand the conventional playwriting repertoire.” For a long time, playwright Lynn Rosen had been sitting on the idea for G$M, based on a real-life story. She hadn’t started it because her vision was for a play so BIG she didn’t think it could ever be produced! When she got the “germ” assignment, she ran with the idea, adding layer upon layer of theatrical elements in delightful and imaginative ways: levitating actors, explosions, jump-cut style, audience participation, and sound and video cues which operate in continuous dialogue with the actors’ work onstage. The play is notable for its technical complexity, but the theatrical tools aren’t just there to add novelty, they’re deeply embedded in the text and vital to the storytelling where they take on a life of their own. Repeated sound cues become a kind of code to aspects of Goldor & Mythyka’s world, and video elements juxtapose with live action so that an action and its consequences inhabit a parallel moment for the audience, or lend insight into the characters’ real desires. 

As a blueprint for her play, Harnetiaux used the structure of exploded view: an illustration or diagram used in manuals (for lawnmowers, bicycles, computers) that shows an object’s parts apart from the whole, but in positions that indicate their relationship to it. Roger and Lucy meet in a convention hall, Daphne and Nick break down at a diner, their stories intertwine as the play swirls around you, rotating on its axis, to articulate the experience of love, with its alternating moments of intimacy and isolation.

Coming off of their Obie Award winning production of A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Great Lakes at City Center in January and the critically acclaimed Heartbreak at The Bushwick Starr in May, New Georges (Susan Bernfield, Producing Artistic Director; Sarah Cameron Sunde, Deputy Artistic Director; Jaynie Saunders Tiller, Managing Director) announces their final production of 2015, the World Premiere of HOW TO GET INTO BUILDINGS by Trish Harnetiaux (If You Can Get to Buffalo with Incubator Arts Project) at The Brick (579 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn 11211; www.bricktheater.com) as part of The Brick’s Resident Artist program, December 3-19. Performances will be Tuesday through Saturday at 8pm with additional shows on Saturday, December 12 and Friday, December 18 at 4pm. Tickets ($18) are available online at www.newgeorges.org or by calling 866-811-4111.

The production will be directed by Katherine Brook (She is King at Incubator Arts Project’s Other Forces Festival) and feature downtown superstars Jess Barbagallo (House of Dance with Half Straddle), Mike Iveson (Gatz with Elevator Repair Service), Kristine Haruna Lee (A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes with New Georges), Tina Shepard (Talking Band), Jacob A. Ware (Agent Selby on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”), and Stephanie Weeks (The Past is Not a Foreign Country with Soho Rep) with Sound Design by Chris Giarmo (Resident Composer for Half Straddle), Choreography by David Neumann (Futurity with Ars Nova/Soho Rep), and Lighting Design by Josh Smith (Feeling with Glass Bandits at The New Ohio).

About the Company: New Georges
New Georges (Susan Bernfield, Artistic Director; Sarah Cameron Sunde, Associate Director) the OBIE-winning theater company founded in 1992 produces highly theatrical new works by women.