Photo Flash: 13P Presents MONSTROSITY At The Connelly

"MONSTROSITY" is a dark, epic tale of singing teenage fascists, magic, war, and love - a disturbing retelling of the hero's tale with a girl as the hero and an unheroic ending. This production will mark 13P's most ambitious production to date.

Lucy Thurber is the author of seven plays: Where We're Born, Ashville, Scarcity, Killers and Other Family, Stay, Bottom of the World and Monstrosity. Rattlestick Playwrights Theater has produced three of her plays; The Atlantic Theater Company opened its 2007/8 season with Scarcity; and Bottom of the World was workshopped by WET (Women's Expressive Theater, Inc.) at the Eugene O'Neill, the first Tribeca Theater Festival and The Public Theater. Monstrosity was workshopped at Encore Theatre Company (San Francisco). Scarcity was published in the December 2007 issue of American Theatre Magazine. Thurber is a member of 13P, New Dramatists, MCC Playwrights Coalition and Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group at Primary Stages. She is currently writing a new play under commission from Playwrights Horizons. Her produced plays are published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Lear deBessonet, the Artistic Director of Stillpoint Productions, has been developing new works for theater in New York since 2003. Her new music-theater piece, On the Levee, is being developed under commission from Yale Repertory Theatre with playwright Marcus Gardley and composer Todd Almond. She has assisted Martha Clarke, Anne Bogart, Marianne Weems, and Bartlett Sher, and was named one of Time Out New York's 25 People to Watch in 2006. Recent productions include her site-specific Don Quixote, a collaboration with Lucy Thurber and the punk-gypsy ensemble The Psalters, in Philadelphia; Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards at Performance Space 122, a collaboration with country-blues singer Kelley McRae; and transFigures, produced Off-Broadway by Women's Project in 2007. Through Stillpoint she also conceived and directed Deborah Stein's Bone Portraits at Walkerspace and Death Might Be Your Santa Claus, a site-specific work performed at an abandoned bank next to the New York Stock Exchange.

The "MONSTROSITY" cast is headed by: Carlo Alban (References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot at The Public; A Winter's Party with LAByrinth); Frank De Julio; J.D. Goldblatt (B'way: Les Miserables revival, and Iphegenia 2.0 at the Signature); Andy Grotelueschen; Ben Hollandsworth (MTC's From Up Here and The Keen Company's Tea and Sympathy); D.J. Mendel; Oppenheimer (Keen Company) and The Universe (Ontological-Hysteric); Reyna de Courcy; Robert Saietta; Samantha Soule (B'way: The Philanthropist and Dinner at Eight; a member of the Drama Desk Award-winning Outstanding Ensemble of The Keen Company's production of The Dining Room); Kristina Valada-Viars (B'way: August: Osage County; Off B'way: The New Group's The Music Teacher); Michael Warner (The Language of Trees at The Roundabout; Pullman Car Hiawatha with The Keen Company); and also features The Teen Army.

The set design will be by Peter Ksander (Othello with Theater for a New Audience and Theater of a Two-Headed Calf productions); the costume design by Emily Rebholz (13P's Have You Seen Steve Steven?; Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at The Public); the lighting design by Justin Townsend (Epic Theatre's Palace of the End; Opus at Primary Stages); and sound design by M.L. Dogg (The Language of Trees). Movement will be by Tracy Bersley (Pericles at Red Bull). Producers for P#8 are George Spelvin and Rachel Karpf. Maria Goyanes serves as 13P's Executive Producer and Karina Mangu-Ward its General Manager.

The members of 13P (www.13P.org) are: Sheila Callaghan, Erin Courtney, Madeleine George, Rob Handel, Ann Marie Healy, Julia Jarcho (P#9, next production), Young Jean Lee, Winter Miller, Sarah Ruhl, Katherine Ryan, Lucy Thurber, Anne Washburn, and Gary Winter.

Photo Credit: Jim Baldassare