Mary Wallace and Athena are brave, and seventeen, and fencers, and training for the Junior Olympics. They practice together, they compete against each other, they spend their lives together. They wish they were friends.
The cast will feature Abby Awe (Bound in Love at The Brick; Gobstopper at The Tank), Julia Greer (Nurse Sluts at The Tank’s LadyFest; For Annie with The Hearth), and Eva Ravenal (Telegraph Bois in Ars Nova’s ANT Fest) with Set Design by Emmie Finckel (Riot Antigone at La MaMa), Costume Design by Dara Affholter (Costume Shop Intern at New York Theatre Workshop), Sound Design by Z Worthington, Lighting Design by Victoria Bain (Assistant Designer on Orange Julius at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater) and Production Stage Manager Wesley Yount.
About the Company: The Hearth
THE HEARTH tells the stories of women. We nurture and celebrate female and non-binary artists (playwrights, directors, actors, and designers) and develop plays that represent the complex and vast spectrum of womanhood. The Hearth produces plays that explore female characters who pulse with emotional, intellectual, and psychological complexity. We seek to challenge stereotypes, advance and complicate the conversation about feminism, and expand perceptions of what it means to be a woman. We are committed to making room for the next generation of female artists in the landscape of the American theater. www.thehearththeater.com
James and Jess are in a relationship. They both cry. She hits things more than he does, but he used to be a well-honed instrument of death. Jess found violence and rage in ballet, keening, orgone therapy. James searched for compassion in martial arts, street fighting, Mongolian wrestling. Apart, they asked four performers what it means to fight as men, to cry as women. Together, they’ve built a two-ring circus of gendered pain welling up with Sweat & Tears, two alchemies of salt and water, two body responses to the difficult work of feeling.
About the Company: M-34
M-34 is a fake mustache, a white phosphorous grenade, a star cluster and a crosstown bus. It is a rotating ensemble of young people attempting to be rigorous, critical and curious in a creative wasteland. We are lying in the gutter but looking at the stars. www.m-34.org
Creative Team:
Playwright: Noah Mease
Director: Alec Duffy
Set Design: Mimi Lien
Lighting Design: Yi Zhao
Costume Design: Oana Botez
Composer: Steven Leffue
Performance schedule:
Friday - Sunday, March 7 - 9
Wednesday - Sunday, March 12 - 16
Tuesday - Saturday, March 18 - 22
All performances at 8 pm
Location:
JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11238
Between Fulton St. and Atlantic Ave. in Clinton Hill.
C or G train to Clinton-Washington.
Website: www.jackny.org
Hoi Polloi is an OBIE-winning New York-based theater company founded in 2007. Pieces are created in collaboration with a core ensemble of artists, usually under the supervision of founding Artistic Director Alec Duffy. Recent work includes Beckett Solos, Baal, All Hands, Shadows, Three Pianos, The less we talk, and Dysphoria. www.hoipolloiworld.com
Arts.Theatre
Donelle Woolford's cathartic new body of work chronicles the place of honor afforded the male sex organ in American art and politics, and continues the oral tradition of phallic humor and innuendo in popular culture. Dick's Last Stand honors Pryor's brash political humor and marks its return to the live stage, where its allegories on race, conformity, representation, and subterfuge are as painfully hilarious as ever. Throughout the original performance, Pryor continually dissembled himself, playing with the notion that Richard Pryor, comedian, was someone who could not be pinned down or controlled. He slid from one character or attitude to the next without ever indicating when -- if ever -- the audience was seeing the "real" Richard Pryor.
This chimerical quality -- this defiance -- is what attracted Woolford to the performance in the first place, but her reenactment pushes the mise en abyme even further. Instead of Richard Pryor playing Richard Pryor playing Mudbone, Dick's Last Stand is Woolford playing Richard Pryor playing Richard Pryor playing Mudbone -- across generations and in drag!
The performance is realized in cooperation with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as part of the 2014 Biennial. This edition of the Biennial -- the country's best-known survey of the latest developments in American art -- will take place March 7May 25, 2014.
(It will be the last Biennial in the Museum's building at 945 Madison Avenue before the Museum moves downtown to its new building in the spring of 2015. This is the 77th in the Museum's ongoing series of Annuals and Biennials begun in 1932 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.)
Dick's Last Stand tour dates:
LA Art Book Fair, Los Angeles 1/31/14
La><art, Los Angeles 2/2/14
Wattis Institute, San Francisco 2/6/14
Solespace, Oakland 2/8/14
MOCAD, Detroit 2/14/14
Dorchester Projects, Chicago 2/18/14
JACK, Brooklyn 3/7/14
The Kitchen, New York 4/1/14
Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis 5/20/14
Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha 5/21/14
White Flag Projects, St. Louis 2/22/14
Contemporary Art Center, Peoria 5/24/14
Dick's Last Stand is accompanied by Dick Jokes, an extraordinary volume of phallic humor compiled from throughout the United States over the past 50 years. It is available at all tour venues and at thingsthatfall.com.
About Donelle Woolford
Donelle Woolford (b. 1980 in Detroit) lives and works in Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Philadelphia, London, and Vienna. She has participated in the exhibitions Double Agent at the ICA London; The 8th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates; and Buy American at Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris. Her performances have been staged at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton; The Suburban, Chicago; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. She is represented by Wallspace, New York, and Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna.
Arts.Performance
Music.Other
Directed by Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.
Lighting Design by Christina Watanabe
Featuring:
Brandt Adams*
Devin Haqq*
Kevaughn Harvey*
Vernice Miller*
Lori Parquet*
Jamie Watkins
Barbra Wengerd*
*Member, Actors Equity Association
AEA Approved Showcase
Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. recently co-wrote and starred in the documentary play Dispatches from (A)mended America, which was produced by OBIE-winning Epic Theatre Ensemble in the fall of 2012. Dispatches... examines the hopes, fears and dreams of the American South during the month leading up to President Barack Obama's inauguration. has been championing and shepherding new scripts and adaptations toward production for over 15 years. He was most recently seen in Epic's take on Richard III entitled Born with Teeth. In summer of 2012, Godfrey appeared as Macduff in Epic's re-imagining of Macbeth in NYC, and in February 2013 he appeared as Hambone in Syracuse Stage's production of Two Trains Running. Godfrey also recently co-wrote and appeared in The Lost Children, Mark Harris' independent film about death cults. Godfrey appeared in Alec Duffy's acclaimed site-specific production of Murder in the Cathedral at The Church of St. Joseph in Brooklyn.
Civic Ensemble creates theatre that explores and explodes the social, political, and cultural issues of our time. Through the production of new and overlooked plays, community-based plays, and re-imaginings of classics, Civic Ensemble works to bring audiences of different races, classes, and experiences together in a public forum on the American experiment.
Above The Fold is Brandt Adams and Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., two actor/writer/teaching artists who make investigative theatre about Race in America.
Arts.Performance