Works from Nightdrive, Buran Theatre, Sinking Ship and More Set for The Tank's 2017 Season

The Tank recently announced their 2017 spring season line up. Performances are at The Tank's midtown home (151 West 46th Street, between 6th & 7th Avenues) as well as at various venues throughout NYC. The ticket prices range from $15 - $35. Tickets to their 2017 shows, which go on sale December 5, are available by visiting www.thetanknyc.org.

The Tank's 2017 season, encompassed by two series (Flint & Tinder and Save & Print), will serve over 1,000 artists in over 400 multi-disciplinary performances at The Tank's blackbox home on 46th Street and at venues across the city.

The Tank's flagship Flint & Tinder series, a curated series of exciting new independent theater, showcases ferociously imaginative emerging artists making work that spans (and often combines) physical theater, puppetry, dance, clowning, and more. This year's Flint & Tinder line-up features the theatrical alchemy of Nightdrive, Kimi Maeda, Eat Drink Tell Your Friends, Buran Theatre, and Sinking Ship Productions.

This year, The Tank launches a new series, Save & Print which features scripted works by some of the most adventurous storytellers in theater. The inaugural S&P series features new plays by Charly Evon Simpson (directed by Colette Robert), Carl Holder (directed by Meghan Finn), and Jay Stull (directed by Andrew Neisler).

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The Tank's full 2017 Spring Season:

TONIGHT, January 13 - Sunday, January 29
Providence, Rhode Island devised by Nightdrive
At The Tank (151 West 46th Street)
Tickets: $15 - $22
Part of The Tank's Flint & Tinder series
There's this town. All these people live there. There are all these places they live in. And eat at. And avoid. And die in. It's the kind of town you hear about and think: "I should take a trip up there. For the fall colors." But you never do. Tonight is all about this town. And its people. And their places. There are also giant squirrels in this town, and memorial dances, and a set of quintuplets mysteriously separated at birth-but we'll get to them later. Providence, RI explores how people build towns, how towns build memories, and how those memories build new people and towns altogether.

Thursday, February 2 - Sunday, February 12
Hottentotted by Charly Evon Simpson, directed by Colette Robert
At The Tank (151 West 46th Street)
Tickets: $18
Part of The Tank's Save & Print series
Hottentotted is a play that yarns together imagined moments in life of Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman, the Hottentott Venus, with the lives and experiences of black American women learned through interviews and conversations over the last two years.

Sunday, February 19 - Sunday, March 12
the ephemera trilogy created and performed by Kimi Maeda
At The Paradise Factory (64 East 4th Street)
Tickets: $25 General Admission, $15 Students, $35 Premium Reserved Seating
Part of The Tank's Flint & Tinder series
Paper and sand, light and shadow, memory and identity, the familiar and the strange; woven together these are the elements that compose Kimi Maeda's ephemera trilogy. the ephemera trilogy's three short solo performances use a range of innovative storytelling techniques and stunning visuals to explore the artist's bi-cultural identity and family history, from a Japanese American internment camp during World War II, to postwar Japan, to suburban New England.
The run begins with an event at the Noguchi Museum on the Japanese Day of Remembrance on February 19.

Thursday, March 16 - Sunday, April 2
Photo & Supply by Eat Drink Tell Your Friends (Andy Manjuck, Rachel Schapira, Ashur Rayis)
At The Tank (151 West 46th Street)
Tickets: $18
Part of The Tank's Flint & Tinder series
Meet Phyllis: She has run a photo development shop in her neighborhood for many years, but now the neighborhood is changing. Business is slow, and Phyllis must close up shop. In protest, boxes unpack themselves, floor tiles shake, and long-forgotten photographs burst to life. Photo & Supply is a puppet show which uses dynamic sets and colorful cast of handmade masks and puppets to tell a story about community, collective memory, and honoring the value of a physical record.

Wednesday, April 12 - Sunday, April 30
Charleses by Carl Holder, directed by Meghan Finn
At The Brick (575 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn)
Tickets: $25 General Admission, $15 Students, $35 Premium Reserved Seating
Part of The Tank's Save & Print series
Charles's son, Charles, has a son named Charles. In the present, three generations of fathers and sons struggle to communicate as their family line grows and ages across a vast ocean of time. How do individuals exist within the infinite passing of years? Do I eat pickles on my sandwich because my great great grandpa did? Charles, Charles, Charles, Charles, Charles Charles Charles.

Thursday, May 11 - Saturday, May 27
TB Sheets by Adam Burnett, directed by Ashley Tata
At The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre (A.R.T. NY Theatres, 502 West 53rd Street)
Tickets: $25 General Admission, $15 Students, $35 Premium Reserved Seating
Part of The Tank's Flint & Tinder series
Set in a tuberculosis sanatorium on a remote mountainside (not unlike Magic Mountain), a community of terminally ill Ones transcend to an order of living saints and build a spaceship to escape their physical ailments. This dizzying and iconoclastic new work celebrates the power and beauty of the fragile body and the multiplicity and fluidity of identity.

Wednesday, May 31- Tuesday, June 27
The Hunger Artist by Sinking Ship Productions, based on the story by Franz Kafka
Written by Josh Luxenberg, directed by Joshua William Gelb, performed by Jonathan Levin
At The Connelly Theater (220 East 4th Street)
Tickets: $25 General Admission, $15 Students, $35 Premium Reserved Seating
Part of The Tank's Flint & Tinder series
"Are you still starving? When are you going to stop...?" What begins as a nostalgic celebration of a lost art form-and its most famous practitioner-becomes a darkly funny trip into the very question of what it means to suffer, and what it means when suffering becomes a public spectacle. In this inventive adaptation of Kafka's tragicomic story "A Hunger Artist," actor, puppeteer and Sinking Ship co-artistic director Jonathan Levin gives a playful and startling performance as the only person who remembers an artist whose act was simply... to hunger.

Thursday, June 1 - Saturday, June 24
STREEPSHOW! written by Jay Stull and directed by Andrew Neisler
At The Connelly Theater (220 East 4th Street)
Tickets: $25 General Admission, $15 Students, $35 Premium Reserved Seating
Part of The Tank's Save & Print series

This is the true story of nine characters, once played by Meryl Streep, picked to live in a house, and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being, oh I don't know, direct and start getting, well, breathy. The characters in STREEPSHOW! have no knowledge of the actress Meryl Streep and think of themselves as real people with uncannily similar, tragic biographies. But when the winner of STREEPSHOW! is promised the opportunity to rewrite her tragedy, it's every Streep for her exquisitely poised self. This is theater in reality TV drag, actors in Meryl drag, and America's pop music canon in cabaret drag. Episodes One and Two are presented together and separately from Episodes Three and Four.

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The Tank is a Manhattan-based non-profit arts presenter and producer. We serve emerging artists engaged in the pursuit of new ideas and forms of expression. Our goal is to foster an environment of inclusiveness and remove the economic barriers from the creation of new work for artists launching their careers and experimenting within their art form. The heart of our services is providing free performance space in the 62-seat blackbox that we operate in Manhattan, and we also offer a suite of other resources such as free rehearsal space, promotional support, and artist fees. Our programming is multi-disciplinary, representing disciplines including theater, music, dance, comedy, film, and storytelling. We keep ticket prices affordable and view our work as democratic, opening up both the creation and attendance of the arts to all and positioning the arts within civic and socio-political discourse.

Founded in 2003 by nine emerging artists, The Tank has since provided an artistic home for tens of thousands of New York City-based performers. Recent successes produced by The Tank as part of Flint & Tinder include Manual Cinema's Ada/Ava (Drama Desk nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience, New York Times Critics' Pick), Mac Wellman's The Offending Gesture (New York Times Critics' Pick), Andrew Schneider's youarenowhere (Drama Desk nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience, New York Times Critics' Pick), and Torry Bend's The Paper Hat Game (New York Times Critics' Pick). Artists who have presented work at The Tank early on in their careers include Alex Timbers (Tony-nominated theater director), Reggie Watts (theater performer/comedian/ musician currently the bandleader on The Late Late Show with James Corden), Amy Herzog (Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright), Lucy Alibar (whose one-act play Juicy and Delicious premiered at The Tank and was adapted to be the Oscar-nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild), Andrew Bujalski (film director, Computer Chess), and We Are Scientists (rock band). The Tank also presented the premiere of A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant by Kyle Jarrow, which won an Obie Award and went on to a national tour. The Tank has been honored with an official City Council proclamation, chosen for the WNYC *STAR* initiative, and featured on CNN, BBC, the New York Times, and more.