BURQ OFF! is an autobiographical one woman show, charting the journey of a British Pakistani Muslim's struggle towards self acceptance. As she navigates the conflicting cultural norms of modern London and her conservative Muslim home, she embodies a cast of 21 characters that infuse the story with comedy, religious fundamentalism, cultural critique and spiritual depth. Along the way you will meet Nadia's aggressive twin brother, her controlling Muslim father, and the essence of joy in the family, her mother. In addition, her Islamic teachers, her life-long 'western' best friend, and the first love of her life add a diversity of perspectives to this deeply moving, personal and universal story.
Nadia Parvez Manzoor (performer, playwright) spent her earlier years in North London, in a Pakistani Muslim home, and has since moved from Singapore to Dubai, to Boston, and now has set her base in Brooklyn, NYC. Most recently, she created and acted in the hit web series, “Shugs and Fats,” on MTV DESI. In addition, she produced and acted in the web pilot, “House Arrest.” Earlier this year, she acted in the Off Broadway Play, PompaPompa (Theatre Row) where she played an old cockney mother. In the past year she has performed regularly in the all female Improv troupe, Thirteen Degrees, at theaters throughout NYC. She teaches Improv, and was trained at Improvolution, a Groundling's based Improv School in NYC. She is also a talented street dancer, and her skills include, Popping, Hip Hop, Bollywood and Bhangra. Nadia P. Manzoor graduated from Boston University with a Masters in Social Work, where her passion was to merge Arts and Social reform. Her one woman show is a manifestation of this intention. Her interests lie in asking provoking questions, and challenging the status quo.
Arts.Theatre
Arts.Theatre
A world premiere play written by Jaclyn Backhaus. John Kurzynowski directs a cast of twelve, including Harlan Alford, Jaclyn Backhaus, Mikey Barringer, Andrew Butler, Nick Fesette, Nick Lehane*, Emily Marro, Sydney Matthews, Anastasia Olowin, Patrick Scheid, Tina Shepard*, and Lauren Swan-Potras. *Actor appearing courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association | Equity Approved Showcase
Realism ... the authentic revelation of truth. The Method of acting truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
In this world premiere nod to the heyday of the American drama, the Lorimer family has gathered to welcome home their former golden boy after tragedy has forced him to retreat to the living room of his youth. A revolving door of newly explored stock characters reveal their inner demons while struggling to achieve the American dream – life, liberty and the pursuit of authenticity.
Theater Reconstruction Ensemble’s epic dissection of the American REAL attempts to rebuild the most iconic and praised theatrical style of the past century while simultaneously questioning its core components. Can we ever truly create something REAL onstage? Or is it only in the struggle to do so that we stumble across that ever-elusive TRUTH?
About the Company: Theater Reconstruction Ensemble
was formed in 2010 as a collective of theater artists striving to reconstruct both classical and contemporary experiments in theater through the playful development of works over time. Recent productions include Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at The Access Theater and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at The Brick. Committed to a collaborative approach to theater making, we function as an ensemble of actors, playwrights, designers, and directors working together to thoroughly examine each element of a theatrical text, from major themes to minute details, and collectively reconstruct canonical works, staying true to the original texts while simultaneously using our own personal connection to these texts to establish unique structures in which to explore and invent.
“Do you know why I come here, Wendy? I come here to hear stories,” declares Peter Pan, the fearless boy who refuses to grow up and the protagonist of Peter~Wendy, an adaptation of the fanciful childhood tale, to be performed November 5 through November 8 at walkerspacein TriBeCa.
Conceived and directed by Jeremy Bloom (Leaves of Grass at the Cell), the plight of Peter takes on new life in an anxiety-ridden, deadly adventurous world of love, fairy dust and twilight. The pajama-clad performers, an exuberant ensemble of twenty lost boys, pirates, fairies, and mermaids, explore familiar text compiled from the J.M. Barrie’s novels, “Peter Pan and Wendy” and “The Little White Bird.” Featuring Bloom’s signature low-tech, inventive image staging, Peter~Wendyreveals the nuances of Neverland.
Cast: Camille Harris, Catherine Brookman, Starr Busby, Chris Hejl, Claire Neuman, Claire Wilmoth, Courtney Zbinden, Florent Chauvin, Heloise Darcq, Holly Chou, Jack Sachs, Jesse Garrison, Jessica McKenna, Joyce Miller, Laila Alj, Maite Alvarez, Mike Placito, Sarah Ann Masse, Sarah Grace Welbourn, Amanda Bloom, Kyle Warren.
NESTING maps one woman’s struggle to maintain her life as it was after a devastating fire. With humor, empathy and love, three uninvited guests enter her grief-stricken world to pull her out of the rubble. 
A struggling actor invites friends and family to his parents' Italian villa for a festive birthday weekend. But he has an ulterior motive: he's making the weekend into a reality TV show and doesn't tell anyone they're being filmed. As his ambition gets the better of him the social experiment spins out of his control.
"Hidden Gem of the Fringe" and "Captivating"- DC Fringe Guide
“there are some beautiful moments of raw humanity” - DC Theatre Scene
“a standout performance by Karin de la Penha... Sezze earns bona fides for ‘Experimental’” - Washington City Paper
KRAKEN explores the true to life encounter between legendary American novelists, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1856. Melville, in the midst of a spiritual journey to the Holy Land, stops to visit with his old friend Hawthorne, now the American consul in Liverpool. As they spend the evening together, they discuss and confront their, fears, failures, things of this world and the next, books and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters.KRAKEN's cast includes: Tom Escovar, Marc Geller*, Richardson Jones*, Tracy Liz Miller*, Heidi Niedermeyer, Eva Patton* and Augustus Truhn. It features set design and lighting design by Ben Kato, costume design by Jessica Gaffney, and a score composed by Scott O'Brien. The production team includes Erin Porvaznik (Associate Producer), Ana Mari De Quesada* (Company Manager), Syche Hamilton (Production Stage Manager), Patrick Cecala (Technical Director), and Nathan Vernon (Associate Press Rep). *Denotes member of Actor's Equity
New York-based, international touring theater companyONE YEAR LEASE
proudly presents the New York premiere of
Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable)
a play by Caridad Svich
directed by Ianthe Demos and Danny Bernardy
featuring original music by Brian Simerson
Meet Iphigenia, the pampered daughter of a ruthless Latin American dictator who learns that she is to be sacrificed for the good of her father. To escape her fate, she embarks on an Alice-in-Wonderland-style trip through the dark fringes of society to reach a rave on the northernmost edge of the city. See what happens when Greek tragedy, an androgynous rock star named Achilles, the ghosts of the Women of Juarez, ecstasy-fueled dancers, the modern media circus, and a history of corrupt rulers are all invited to the same huge party.
Caridad Svich's modern script riffs on the myth of Iphigenia as told by Euripides and Racine but instead of the windless shores of Greece, the ill-fated love of Iphigenia and Achilles is set in a pop-culture-crazed Latin landscape where young Iphigenia is pursued by a media that can destroy her just as brutally as her father's henchman and where she will learn more than she bargained for about lust, violence, sacrifice, and celebrity. And love. Above all, deep, passionate, screwed-up love.
One Year Lease is currently rehearsing the play in Papingo, Greece, marking the second time that Iphigenia Crash Land Falls has been to the mountains of Northern Greece. The play was originally developed by the Actors Touring Company (UK) at the Euripides Festival in Monodendri under the direction of Nick Philippou. The play, short-listed for the 2005 PEN USA-WEST Award in drama, premiered in the US at 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta.
"Caridad Svich's Iphigenia...a rave fable is an exhilarating play.
The narrative subtlety is what makes Svich's redux of Euripides'
Iphigenia in Aulis so stirring... A play of mythic power." -Variety
Cast:
Danny Bernardy* (Co-Director, Achilles, Chorus), Nick Flint, Susannah Melone (Camila, Violeta Imperial, Chorus), Brina Stinehelfer (Iphigenia), Gregory Waller (Adolfo, Virtual MC, Chorus)
*indicates member of Actor's Equity Association
Production Team: Jessica Applebaum (Dramaturg), Danny Bernardy (Co-Director), Ianthe Demos (Co-Director), James Hunting (Set Design), Kay Lee (Costume Design), Mike Riggs (Lighting Design), Brian Simerson (Composer), Brian Thomas (Video and Graphic Design)
ABOUT CARIDAD SVICH:
Award-winning Latina playwright, Svich's work includes Any Place But Here (Theatre for the New City, directed by Maria Irene Fornes), Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man's Blues (Cincinnati Playhouse, directed by Lisa Peterson), Antigone Arkhe (The Women's Project, directed by Annie Dorsen), and the multimedia collaboration with Todd Cerveris and Nick Philippou The Booth Variations (59 East 59th Street/NY and 2005 Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival). Her new play with songs Thrush premieres at Salvage Vanguard Theatre in Austin this fall. In development: music-theatre version of Federico Garcia Lorca's Yerma with composer Elizabeth Swados and director Kay Matschullat.
ABOUT ONE YEAR LEASE:
Before opening in New York, One Year Lease will workshop Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable) in the mountains of Northern Greece. Rehearsing in the tiny village of Papingo, the ensemble of five actors will build the project in the country that is home to the original myth of Iphigenia and perform for impromptu audiences of villagers before returning to New York City's Walkerspace. With Iphigenia Crash Land Falls, OYL continues its exploration of evocative modern adaptations of the classics.
One Year Lease, founded in 2000, is a New York-based theater company dedicated to revitalizing classic texts. They have created a community of American and international artists who work together on productions performed both in the United States and abroad. Recent productions include Phaedra x 3: a project featuring three provocative adaptations of the myth of Phaedra including Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love, Matthew Maguire's Phaedra, and Jean Racine's Phedre translated by Ted Hughes (Monodendri and Papingo, Greece; The Cherry Lane, New York); Antigone (The UnConvention Theater Festival, Abingdon Theater, New York); Machinal (Theater for the New City); Look Back in Anger (Abingdon Theater Arts Complex, New York); Oresteia (Theater for the New City, New York; Deree College Amphitheater, Athens, Greece; Theatro Alfredo Chiesa, Milan, Italy; Antigone (The Raw Space, New York; Theatro Technis, Athens, Greece) and Miss Julie (Sanford Meisner Theater and The Pulse Theater).
Blood Wedding involves two families in a semi-mythical rural Spain who are intricately bound in an unbreakable cycle of murder and revenge. The death-bound love triangle at the center of the play fuels these passions to a fever pitch and propels the story to its unstoppable tragic conclusion. An arranged country marriage between the children of rich landowners is about to take place. A past lover, himself in a loveless marriage, cannot allow the wedding to take place and spirits the Bride away, who goes with him willingly on her wedding night. An entire town goes after the lovers in the middle of the night where pursuers and pursued plunge into a realm of deep darkness where the moonlight is not friendly and the forest not shelter enough. Lorca's image-laden poetry unfolds the story with the fire and power characteristic of his work and the fateful resonance that marked his own tragically short life. BONE PORTRAITS examines 19th century inventiveness (the birth of film, electricity, and radiography) through the use of 21st century technology. Smashing live video against classic vaudeville routines, it tells the stories of the famous -- including Thomas Edison and Marie Curie -- and unknown people for whom the X-ray raised more questions than it answered.
A young artist comes to Greenwich Village in 1927 to become a painter. What he encounters is a madhouse full of bohemians, four of whom change his life: a writer who doesn't write, a model who wants to act, a wife that keeps loneliness at bay by sleeping with the whole building, and a poet whose verse is just a pick-up line in the original days of "free sex". 
Come and enjoy a wild ride through Shakespeare's rough and tumble world of courtship and marriage with The Queen's Company's unique production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, with an all-feamale castTHE TAMING OF THE SHREW is Shakespeare's classic comedy about love between a perfect pair of divas. Everybody loves Bianca (played by a blow-up doll) but no one can marry her until her feisty older sister, Kate, is married off. Enter Petruchio, a finger-lickin' ladies man on the lookout for a wealthy wife. Let the fireworks begin! Happy ending guaranteed.
The world premiere of THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT, five stories from the book by Aimee Bender adapted for the stage by Bridgette Dunlap, opens off-off-Broadway on October 15. In each story, an isolated female protagonist, frantic to experience life, is passionate in a way that she cannot express; she exists in a world not unlike our own in its grotesque beauty.Pushing the boundaries of realism with fantastical transformations and deformities, THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT investigates the nature of otherness and isolation with humor and pathos. Bridgette Dunlap adapts five short stories, The Rememberer, Legacy, Drunken Mimi, The Healer, and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, creating a world twisted on its axis. Mimi is a closeted mermaid. Annie's lover is experiencing reverse evolution. The fire girl can't stop burning things. A pregnant teen is sent to live with a hunchback. And a girl goes up in flames.
An Equity Showcase
What if Romeo and Juliet were both young women and that fact didn't figure into their family's reasons for wanting to keep them apart? For that matter, what if any two young women in America fell in love, and it never occurred to anyone to want keep them apart? The CRY HAVOC Company asks the first question and begs the second with their upcoming production of Romeo & Juliet – featuring two women in the title roles. Romeo & Juliet captures with startling accuracy the harrowing experience of being an adolescent in the flush of first love – at a time of life when love is rarely true, but is always desperately real. Placing two women at the center of this story serves to highlight the deep complexities in this central relationship, which are all-too-often glossed over in favor of the heart stickers and fluffy kittens that compose an adult's conception of teenage love. Romeo and Juliet charge at love the hard way – in a world where love is love. Fear is fear. Adolescence is adolescence. No matter who it happens to. And no matter who they choose to spend it with.