In New England, the winter is five months long. Everybody eats beans, the pipes always freeze, and everything’s buried under six feet of snow. Moving from dreary 1970s New England to an 1840s Transcendental utopia and beyond, Old Paper Houses follows a group of wavering idealists searching for meaning and purpose in all the wrong places. Combining paper dioramas, ecstatic small-town parades, live feed projection and poetry by Bernadette Mayer, Old Paper Houses cycles through faith and doubt to ask: how do we continue to find things to believe in, even when it’s really, really cold?
The theater collective Piehole will present the World Premiere of Old Paper Houses, an original performance piece with texts by poet Bernadette Mayer (Winner of the 2014 Shelley Memorial Award), directed by Tara Ahmadinejad (New York Theatre Workshop “2050 Fellow”) February 27-March 14 at the historic Irondale Center (85 South Oxford Street between Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn). Performances will be 2/27 at 8pm, 2/28, 3/2, 3/3, 3/5, 3/6, 3/7, 3/11, 3/12, 3/13 & 3/14 at 7:30pm, and 3/14 at 3pm, with special post-show events happening after select performances. Tickets ($18; $15 students) are available at oldpaperhouses.brownpapertickets.com or by calling 1-800-838-3006. Runtime is 75 minutes, without an intermission.
Drawing from Mayer’s The Golden Book of Words and Midwinter Day, along with research on 1840s Transcendentalist communes, Piehole has been developing Old Paper Houses since 2013 with Collaborating Writer Jessie Renee Hopkins and Dramaturg Elliot B. Quick. Performers will include Nora Fox*, Allison LaPlatney, Benoit Johnson, Alexandra Panzer, Emilie Soffe, Ben Vigus, and Jeff Wood. The creative team will include Set Design by Kristen Robinson, Costume Design by Nikki Delhomme, Projection Design by Paul Piekarz, Lighting Design by Serena Wong, Sound Design by Joseph Wolfslau, and Original Compositions by Jason Sigal. The production Stage Manager will be Hannah Spratt. *Appearing courtesy of the Actors’ Equity Association.
Piehole has been developing Old Paper Houses since the particularly brutal winter of 2013. After finding solace in Bernadette Mayer’s struggle through the New England winter in The Golden Book of Words, which references Nathaniel Hawthorne, they found themselves enmeshed in Hawthorne’s satire on Transcendental utopian angst, The Blithedale Romance. Through workshops over the course of 2013 and early 2014, Piehole delved more deeply into research on Brook Farm, the 19th century commune on which the novella was based, and incorporated more text from Mayer’s Midwinter Day, to create an exploration of the American utopian pursuit in its many forms—past, present, and potential; artistic, political, and social. A workshop of Old Paper Houses was presented at the Connelly Theater in March 2014, and a selection of it was curated into Prelude14 at CUNY Graduate Center.
During the Irondale run of Old Paper Houses, Piehole will host events following each performance in the show’s final location, a “Post-Utopianist Hang Out Space.” The events will feature performances and exhibitions by local artists. Check www.pieholed.com for updates on the programming for these events.
About the Company: Piehole
Piehole is a laboratory of theater artists who investigate the process of collaboration and collective authorship to create live events. They draw from a shared fascination with objects and media, and continually reimagine their process, driven by an ongoing pursuit of surprise, delight and beauty in unexpected places. They invite audiences into this pursuit to encourage agency in one’s thinking, perceiving, and feeling, as well as an expanded sense of potential realities.
Piehole's work has performed at art galleries, theaters, warehouses, and hotel rooms, in NYC, Philly, and Prague. They have received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, BAX, the Mental Insight Foundation, and Puppeteers of America. Recent works have included The Fizzles (based on the collaborative book by Jasper Johns and Samuel Beckett), which performed at Triple Canopy in Greenpoint and is slated to perform at JACK in Clinton Hill, and 2 Stories that End in Suicide, which performed at HERE Arts Center and The Brick Theater. Piehole’s current core group includes Tara Ahmadinejad, Allison LaPlatney, Alexandra Panzer, Elliot B. Quick, and Jeff Wood.
New Georges (Susan Bernfield, Producing Artistic Director; Sarah Cameron Sunde, Deputy Artistic Director; Jaynie Saunders Tiller, Managing Director) in association withIrondale Center (85 Oxford Street between Lafayette Avenue and Fulton Street, Brooklyn) will present the World Premiere of Kara Lee Corthron’s ALICEGRACEANON,October 18-November 9. The production will be directed by Kara-Lynn Vaeni and will feature Carolyn Baeumler (Lisa Kron’s The Veri**zon Play at the Humana Festival), Eric Clem (The Elephant Man at Williamstown Theatre Festival), Matt Dellapina (The Civilians’ In the Footprint at Irondale), Teresa Avia Lim (Quiara Alegria Hudes’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Water by the Spoonful at Hartford Stage), and Christina Pumariega (Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar on Broadway).The creative team will include Sound Design by Marcelo Añez, Music Direction by Ralph Capasso, Set Design by Nick Francone, Costume Design by Liam O’Brien, Installation Design by Rachel Schapira, and Lighting Design by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew. The production will also feature The Spectacle Brigade, a 10-member chorus who facilitate inventive moments of theatricality and play smaller parts; and a live band in the “role” of Jefferson Airplane. Special guest musicians will sit in with the band during a break in the action at each performance. A complete schedule will be available at www.newgeorges.org.
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.
The classic tale of Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver and swashbuckling pirates theatricalized by Tony Awarding winning fight director B.H. Barry, Treasure Island is a spine–tingling adventure about treachery, treasure and a young man’s rite of passage.
“I have been developing this version of “Treasure Island” for over twelve years and am so very excited to mount this production in Brooklyn and hopefully beyond. ” B.H Barry
B.H. Barrylearned how to handle a sword under the tutelage of the great Paddy Creane (Errol Flynn’s stunt double) and has taught around the world at places such as London Academy of Dramatic Art, The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Juilliard School, Yale, and NYU, as well as guest teaching at many universities around the country. B.H. is considered the world’s leading Fight Director for the stage, during his career, he has done over 40 Broadway productions (including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Ragtime, The Life, Crazy for You, An Inspector Calls, City of Angels, Moon Over Buffalo), nine feature films (including The Impostors, Glory, The Addams Family, Mulan), 84 Off-Broadway productions, 19 productions at the Metropolitan Opera, 32 regional productions, ballet, television (including “All My Children,” “As the World Turns”) and numerous productions around the globe, including The Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC. He has been awarded a Drama Desk and an Obie Award for Sustained and Consistent Excellence in Stage Combat and was recently awarded Broadway’s highest honor, a Tony Award for Excellence in Theatre.
Treasure Island
Based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson;
Adapted for the stage by Vernon Morris and B.H. Barry
Directed by B.H. Barry
Begins performances Tuesdays, February 15;
Opens, Saturday, March 5 and will run through Saturday, March 26, 2011
Tickets are $20-$45
To purchase tickets visitwww.Irondale.orgor call Ovation Tix 866 811 4111
Student Rush $15 (cash at the door w/ ID)
PIRATES PROMISE
“First come, first served” the first batch of the BEST seats in the house will be sold for only $20
Performance schedule:
Monday- Friday at 7:30PM; Saturday at 3PM & 8PM
Brooklyn’s Irondale Center is located 85 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn, New York, 11217
Running Time: 2 hours with Intermission
Appropriate for ages 8+
Press Performances: Tuesday, March 1 at 7:30PM; Wednesday, March 2 at 7:30PM;
Thursday, March 3 at 7:30PM; Friday, March 4 at 7:30; Saturday, March 5 at 3PM
B.H. Barry is available to discuss his upcoming production. Please contact Springer Associates PR at 212 354 4660 to arrange interviews and press seats.
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Presented by White Bird Productions. Shifting between a woman’s childhood memories of Mississippi in 1963 and her pressure-packed life in the present day, Born of Conviction asks, “Do you stay to confront social injustice, or do you leave to save your family?” Kelly doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going: she’s grieving over her father’s death, a white Mississippi minister; raising a New York City teenage daughter fomenting rebellion; and battling her African-American boyfriend, who’s only trying to give her the love she doesn’t feel she deserves. Maybe that’s why ghosts from her Southern Civil Rights-era past suddenly start haunting her. Playwright Kathryn Dickinson draws from documentary and biographical material for her latest play including the Born of Conviction statement signed in 1963 by 28 white Methodist ministers (including Dickinson’s father) of the Mississippi southern Methodist Conference. The statement opposed discrimination, communism and the closing of public schools to establish private academies using state funds.
Featuring: Dana Berger, Tammuz Frankel, Kathryn Velvel Jones*, Lila Smith Marooney, Jordan Mahome*, Christianna Nelson*, Barret O’Brien*, Amelia Olsen, Joel Van Liew*, Jennifer Dorr White*
Scenic Design: Kevin Judge
Lighting Design: Nick Francone
Costume Design: Liam O'Brien
Production Stage Manager: Tamesis Batiste
Producer: Kelly Hanson
Assistant Producer: Lorrie Harrison
Production Manager: Jeremy Lydic
Assistant Director: Starr Kirkland
About White Bird Productions
Based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY, White Bird Productions has been developing and presenting original theater since 1990. White Bird's Creative Theatrics program offers summer and after school programming to children and youth in Brooklyn, matching hundreds of young actors’ imaginations with the resources and skills of professional theater artists. The company has commissioned and produced original adaptations of Grimm’s Tales by Lynn Nottage, Melissa James Gibson, Jenny Lyn Bader, Marjorie Duffield, Onome Ekeh and the father-daughter teams of Jeffrey M. Jones and Camila Jones, and Len Jenkin and Zoe Jenkin. White Bird’s The Barbie Project at the OHIO Theater, produced to great acclaim, offered adults a forgotten glimpse of their childhoods.
For more information about White Bird Productions visit www.whitebirdproductions.org or call 718.398.3658.
*Members Actors Equity
Inspired by the historic festivals where everyday citizens came together to elevate their communities by staging the death and resurrection of Christ, Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play transports audiences first to 16th century England, where Queen Elizabeth threatens to shut down a small town's production; then to Nazi Germany, where Adolf Hitler's arrival at the famous Oberammergau Passion Play influences the lives of its cast and finally to Spearfish, South Dakota in 1984, as a local production becomes a campaign stop for a famous actor-turned-President running for re-election. Mark Wing-Davey returns as director following his highly acclaimed productions of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play at the Goodman Theatre and Yale Repertory Theatre, but is re-envisioning the play for this site-specific New York premiere.
The full cast includes Hale Appleman, Brendan Averett, Dominic Fumusa, Polly Noonan, Daniel Pearce, Alex Podulke, Keith Reddin, Godfrey L. Simmons Jr., T. Ryder Smith, Kate Turnbull and Nicole Wiesner.
Hailed by The New Yorker’s John Lahr as “extraordinary” and full of “verve and daring”, Ruhl’s three-play cycle will be the centerpiece of an unforgettable Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play Festival, a series of performances, panel discussions, workshops, and education programs highlighting the intersection of art, politics, sexuality, and religion.
Schedule of Readings