{The PlayPaper} Edition #1

{The PlayPaper} Our Newsletter

Edition #1: 2010/11 SEASON WRAP UP

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Dear Friends,

 Here’s where we went together this past season:

• A scruffy New Jersey burger joint, where three teenagers fended for themselves in war-torn suburbia, provoking us to laugh one minute and jump out of our seats the next.

• A theatre in Tribeca that was taken over as soon as the lights went down by a band of unexpected storytellers riffing on a name – Abulkasem – that blew our minds open to how we see (or are blind to) ourselves and the people around us.

• The poppy fields, bunkers, NGO offices and snowy mountain passes of Afghanistan, where stories from that country’s complicated history brought insight and feeling to present day headlines.

The plays we produced not only plunged into urgent events and issues of right now, they also played with language and theatrical form. I certainly hope you enjoyed the shows and felt they transported you to somewhere new.

According to American Theatre Magazine, PlayCo is “Word Drunk and World Savvy”. We’re getting ready for 2011-12, and will share all the news about that shortly.  But I can tell you today that we are bringing INVASION! back to kick off the season. Why remount a show (something we’ve never done before) instead of producing a new project? This show started a conversation about how we define ourselves as Americans, and how we perceive others, that needs to continue.  The theatre was alive at every performance last February and March because of the risks the artists and the audiences took together.

The response to the show was really exciting, but many people did not get to see it during its short run.  Small theatre companies like PlayCo rarely get to extend the life of their work. We believe this play is important for our community at this moment and we want more people to see it.  So we’re bringing it back for four more weeks in September at the Flea Theatre, where we will be based next year. If you missed it, come see what all the excitement was about.  If you saw it, come back and bring your friends! PERFORMANCES BEGIN SEPTEMBER 6TH!

Thank you so much for being part of PlayCo’s work and mission.  I wish you a beautiful, fun, revitalizing end of summer. As always, we look forward to seeing you at the theatre.

Best,

P.S. Visit our new blog for updates and info on the production process of INVASION! and ‘Like’ our facebook page to get special offers and invitations!

 

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CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS TO INVASION!

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PlayCo has a brand new look!  Check out our new website: www.playco.org

U.S. Premiere production of INVASION! by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

PlayCo will present the U.S. Premiere of INVASION!, a play by the Swedish playwright and novelist Jonas Hassen Khemiri next month, directed by Erica Schmidt (Trust with PlayCo) and translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles.

INVASION! is a subversive comedy that centers on Abulkasem – a name that just might have magical powers. Everyone wants that name, but who is Abulkasem? A hero in a fairytale. A world-renowned stage director. A cute guy I met at the bar. A shadowy figure we’re tracking across the globe. Or all of the above? Who is Abulkasem? And how many are there?

Playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Jonas Khemiri is an acclaimed novelist and playwright. His father is Tunisian and his mother is Swedish. INVASION!, his first play, became one of the biggest hits of recent years at the Stockholm City Theatre, where it opened in 2006. Since then, it has been produced in Germany, Norway, London and France. Jonas’ many awards include the Borås Prize for Best Swedish Literary Debut with his novel One Eye Red, and for his second novel, Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, the PO Enquist Literary Prize for accomplish European novelists under forty. Montecore will be published in the U.S. by Random House in March 2011, marking Jonas’ English-language literary debut and coinciding with the run of INVASION!.

PlayCo founding producer Kate Loewald says, “This play uses wit and theatricality to talk about serious racial and cultural divisions in our society. Jonas has broken new ground in Swedish theatre and literature with both his themes and his beautiful love of language. We are a nation of immigrants, and New York City is home to people of hundreds of nationalities. I think this play speaks to the moment in a dazzling way – it is surprising, funny and moving.  I’m so excited to introduce this writer to audiences in the U.S.”

INVASION! is the second project in PlayCo’s Universal Voices Translation program, which commissions new American translations of outstanding foreign plays.

Featured in the cast of INVASION! are Francis Benhamou (Three Women at 59E59 Theaters), Andrew Guilarte (Marat/Sade at Classical Theatre of Harlem), Bobby Moreno (ReEntry at Center Stage Baltimore) and Debargo Sanyal (Queens Boulevard at Signature Theatre).

Scenic design for INVASION! is by Antje Ellermann (Trust and Sakharam Binder with PlayCo); costume design is by Oana Botez Ban (Romania. Kiss Me! with PlayCo); lighting design is by Matthew Richards (Made in Poland with PlayCo); and sound design is by Bart Fasbender (Trust, Sakharam Binder, Terrorism, Arabian Night, The Attic, Bad Jazz, Made in Poland, and Edgewise with PlayCo).

Previews: February 9th
Opening Night: February 21st

Running through: March 12
Performance schedule:

Mondays through Fridays – 7:30 p.m.

Saturdays – 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Ticketsare $30 and $40 and can be reserved at https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/30245

A Personal Welcome from Kate & Lauren

Executive Producer Lauren Weigel & Founding Producer Kate Loewald

Dear Friends,

Fall is here and for us the snap in the air is very welcome.  The Play Company is moving into the new season at full speed, rolling out our new logo, new audience membership program, and first-ever season brochure. Cool air and bright leaves bring new energy as we begin the 2010-11 season, which includes more plays than ever before.

EDGEWISE, a new play by 25 year-old American writer Eliza Clark, begins performances at Walkerspace in Tribeca on November 9th, directed by PlayCo Artistic Associate Trip Cullman. We’re co-producing this world premiere with our friends at Page 73 Productions, where Eliza is the current Playwriting Fellow.

Swedish playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri was in town last month to work with us on his play INVASION!. We’ve commissioned a new translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles, who also translated Jonas’s novel Montecore, to be published in the U.S. by Knopf next year. We now look forward to producing the American premiere of INVASION! in February, directed by Erica Schmidt.

And we’ve made special arrangements for PlayCo members to attend the Tricycle Theatre’s production of THE GREAT GAME: AFGHANISTAN when it’s presented by The Public Theater, in association with the NYU Skirball Center, in December. We’re teaming up with The Public and the Skirball Center to present a series of panel discussions, exhibits and special events, to complement this 3-part exploration of the history and culture of Afghanistan from Western involvement in 1842 to the present. You can see each part separately, or experience the whole thing, as Kate did, in a weekend marathon.

Our society is going through a forceful churn – economic, political and social – and in the midst of it all we’re thinking a lot about the role of small theatres like The Play Company. We stretch every day to make ends meet with modest resources.  But the small scale also gives us a freedom, and responsibility, to be ambitious and take big risks on untested artists and projects with great promise. That’s our job.

The Play Company is the only theatre offering you a season of new plays from around the world. At a time when the country around us seems to be turning inward, we insist on looking out at the world through the intimate, live theatre experience. We hope you’ll join us.

Best,

P.S. Become a fan of our Facebook page and get special offers!

Greetings from the Philippines Part II

Kate was kind enough to send us this letter during the last weekend of her trip. She’s Stateside once again, and we’ll be sharing more of her stories and pictures in upcoming posts. We’ve thrown some links into her message, so click away and learn about the organizations and people she’s been working and traveling with.

Dear Play Co. Family,

Our trip so far has been fascinating.  I feel I have been here a month, rather than four days, because of all that we’ve done and seen. I’m traveling with John Eisner and May Adrales from the Lark Play Development Center, playwrights Lloyd Suh (American Hwangap), David Henry Hwang (M Butterfly, Yellowface, etc.) and Rehana Mirza (also along as documentarian of the trip), and fellow producers of Hwangap Jorge Ortoll of Ma-Yi Theatre and Loretta Grecco of the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

We’re here to culminate the theatre consortium project around Hwangap, and to learn about the playwriting scene here in the Philippines. We’re grateful to have David with us on this trip. When he was here in 2008 for the CCP (Cultural Center of the Philippines) production of Golden Child he started a conversation with local writers about the need for more opportunity for new play production. He wants to help find solutions.

The first couple of days we appeared on several panels at theatres and universities around the city, as well as at Asia Society, mainly talking about what we do.  We also met with writers in the Writer’s Bloc playwrights group (the leading writers group here) and heard excerpts from their plays.

Student theatre is very active here and seems like the main venue for fresh work. Aside from one festival of one-acts each year at CCP, it seems there is almost no opportunity for new plays to be produced! There is no Off-Off Broadway scene to serve as incubator, for example.

Yesterday we spent the day at PETA, the Philippines Educational Theatre Association – a lively and amazing organization. They started in the 1960s as a street theatre company, akin to the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Bread and Puppet Theater in the States.

They create theatre and educational workshops for young people, often focused on social issues like domestic violence or HIV. They also bring together theatre groups and artists from the region to tour, as in a recent Mekong Delta festival. They produce in their own space and also tour Manila and the archipelago, reaching an estimated 80,000 people each year.

About 15 years ago they left their beloved outdoor theatre and built a venue for themselves (it took 10 years), which we visited yesterday. Folks, this is my dream building. It has a flexible theatre space (about 400 seats) with two floors of rehearsal studios and flexible rooms where people from the community come for classes and activities. There is also a library, a kitchen, a lobby/reception area with a baby grand piano where you can have small performances, and a roof garden that acts as a performance space, reception site and general hang-out spot.

PETA Building

Yesterday the building was FULL of people.  There were kids from one of the poorest sections of Manila doing a raucous theatre workshop on one floor (a girl of maybe 14 was there with her baby.) On another, kids were painting an art project.  Down the hall, kids were being fed dinner.  In another a commercial producer was preparing a reading of a new musical… and on and on and on.

The building took ten years and countless buckets of blood, sweat and tears to accomplish.  They talked about what a struggle it is to keep it going – the cost of maintaining and operating is very burdensome to them.  Nevertheless it is alive and so inspiring. I am adding it to my list of such touchstone theatres in the world like The Public and The Tricycle in London.

We met PETA leaders and members of the Writer’s Block to brainstorm about how to create more opportunities for new play development and production in the Philippines. I gather that in the Marcos years, as well as earlier in the country’s history, there was a strong tradition of new plays.  But that has disappeared and producers are not willing to take the financial risk to produce new work.  They have not developed audiences for it. Unlike Singapore, for example, where the economy has stabilized to the point where government is investing in culture as a tool to further tourism and national profile, there is no funding to be had in the Philippines.  Most of PETA’s funding comes from foreign NGOs.

Playwright Lloyd Suh in front of their beautiful lobby mural

It was interesting to hear discussion of how PETA keeps writers active by commissioning work, but this topic-oriented work does not fill the need for writers to create work that springs from their own vision and inspiration.

We tried to get to small, concrete steps these artists could take to make progress and I think we got somewhere.

I look forward to sharing more with you when I am back in NYC.  ‘Til then, I hope all is well with you.

Best,
Kate

Greetings from the Philippines!

Artistic Director Kate Loewald, playwright/documentary filmmaker Rehana Mirza and playwright Lloyd Suh at the airport in Seoul about to board a connecting flight to Manila. Only four more hours to go!

Our artistic director, Kate Loewald, is in the Philippines this week with playwright Lloyd Suh for the launching of American Hwangap at Tanghalang Pilipino.  This is the inaugural production of the “Launching New Plays into the Repertoire” initiative hosted by the Lark Play Development Center with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Play Company, in co-production with the Ma-Yi Theater Company, gave American Hwangap its New York premiere in 2008. Kate was kind enough to send these pictures along for us to enjoy!

Kate Loewald, Lark Artistic Director John Clinton Eisner and Rehana Mirza at the airport in Seoul

You can view pictures from the Play Co. production of American Hwangap on our website. And keep checking in for more information on our upcoming season!

Lloyd Suh in front of the poster for his play "American Hwangap" at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manilla

The set for "American Hwangap" by Lloyd Suh