Horse Trade Theatre Group Presents 'Made at Horse Trade' Series, 8/10-29

The Made At Horse Trade Series will feature two works developed through Horse Trade Theater Group's The Fire This Time Festival, Yusef Miller's Breakfast and Kelley Nicole Girod's Ambrosia, playing as a double feature August 10-29 at The Red Room (85 East 4th Street between 2nd Ave and Bowery), Monday & Wednesday at 8pm and Sundays at 3pm. Tickets ($18/$15 students & seniors) are available online at www.horseTRADE.info or by calling Smarttix at 212-868-4444.

Breakfast
Written by Yusef Miller
Directed by Zoey Martinson
Featuring Juliette Jeffers & Sean C. Turner
After their gay teenage son's suicide, Harriet and Glen's love falls under scrutiny. Their ritualistic breakfasts together reveal a pathological battleground of neglect and fear. Closure is offered from an unlikely source, their son.

"A moving and highly theatrical portrait of a family in denial."
Martin Denton, nytheatre.com (The Fire This Time Festival, Ten Minute Plays)

Ambrosia
Written by Kelley Nicole Girod
Directed by Nicole Watson
Featuring Nick Maccarone & Sarah Stephens
Set in a sleepy Southern town in the sweltering dead of summer, a life-long diabetic decides that she would rather eat cake.

Yusef Miller (Playwright, Breakfast) In 2006, Yusef suspended his acting career to pursue Playwriting. He was then accepted as a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwright Fellow at The Juilliard School and mentored by Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang. In 2007, he was awarded the Le Comte Du Nouy Prize for Excellence in Playwriting. In 2008, he was subsidized for the entire year, being awarded the inaugural Frederick Fellowship. His plays include: Breakfast: Lark Roundtable, Horse Trade Theater Group/The Fire This Time Festival; Hookyjook, the Land of...: Lark Roundtable Reading; The Ford Foundation and The Classical Theatre of Harlem's Future Classics Reading; Arnold Weissberger Nominee (Williamstown); Lincoln Center Theater's Directors Lab Investigation; Reverie Production's Next Generation Playwriting Contest Semi-Finalist; The Juilliard School Reading. It Takes a Village. Aaron&Tekla: The Juilliard School Reading; The Dramatists Guild of America, Inc., Reading. The House of Buddy Baines: Lark's Playwrights Week, Semi-Finalist; The Juilliard School Workshop Reading. Songs of My So-Called Masculinity: NYU Workshop Reading. His films include: Ding-Dong: Ripfest #10 Short Film Festival. Patent Leather Scars, produced, written, starring him. Yusef is a member of AEA and SAG. He has a BA, English, Morehouse College; Certificate of Acting, Alliance Theater Professional Acting Intern Company; MFA, Theatre and Dance, University of California, San Diego. www.yusefmiller.com

ZOEY MARTISON (Director, Breakfast) is the co-Artistic Director of smoke&mirrors Collaborative in NYC, and the executive director of Bright Future Arts International in Ghana West Africa. She holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase College and MFA from NYU Grad Acting, and has trained in classical theatre/ mask in London, England. She has been working with young artists for over 10 years, teaching in England, Ghana, South Africa and Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. As an actress, she has performed at the Guthrie, NYSF/ The Public, Shakespeare On The Sound, 365 Plays/Days at The Public, Purchase Repertory Theatre, Signature Theatre, Penobscot Theatre, The Flea Theatre, Broom Street Theatre, Theatre in the Muz, South Africa, The National Theatre of Ghana, and the Diorama theatre in London. She works in physical theatre and mask, as a writer/director/performer. She has directed two short films, one documentary and theatre in Ghana, West Africa, Jo'burg, Cape Town, South Africa. Richmond University, London. Purchase College, and NYU Grad Acting Freeplay and African Mysteries project with MarK Wing Davey. The show The Skype Duet in Berlin and NYC, that she co-created and directed won an award for it's performance at the HAU 2 in Germany, and TONY Lounge at New World Stages, Hell On Me for the Los Angeles Women's Theatre Festival.

KELLEY NICOLE GIROD (Playwright, Ambrosia) is a 2008 graduate of Columbia's MFA playwriting program where she was named the Stein and Liberace scholar as well as the John Golden fellow for her artistic merit. Kelley hails from Louisiana where she attended Louisiana State University and works extensively with the artistic community of Baton Rouge, most recently serving as a panel judge for Louisiana's artist in residency program. She has had plays produced in Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans, and Columbus, Ohio and has had readings at Primary Stages, the Labyrinth studio and Horse Trade Theater Group, which produced her play Parabolas and where she serves as resident playwright, teaching artist, literary manager and executive producer of The Fire This Time Festival.

Nicole Watson (Director, Ambrosia) is a freelance director and educator. Credits include Two Gentlemen of Verona (The 52nd Street Project, NYC and Banff Center, Canada), BlindSight: A Melodic Hypothesis (Women Center Stage Festival), Light Sweet Crude (Subjective Theatre Company), Homage 3:Illmatic (Black River Performing Arts Center), a workshop of Oyamo's musicAl White Hot Black Spice (New Dramatists, NYC), Deconstruction by Anne Phelan (Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn), Reverb by Radha Blank (The Fire This Time Festival), One Minute-Play Festival (HERE Arts Center, NYC), Derek Walcott's Ti-Jean and His Brothers (NYU-Tisch School of the Arts, NYC), Foreclosure (NYTE at the Access Theatre, NYC), David Hilder's Just Exactly Like (The Flea, NYC), and Daniel McCoy's Eli and Cheryl Jump (2009 Fringe Festival, NYC). She was also a co-writer on Indomitable: James Brown, the Music, the Man (Apollo Theater Salon Series) and was an invited artist at the 2011 Voice and Visions Retreat where she worked with Dominique Morisseau on Paradise Blue. A former history teacher, Nicole has been a teaching artist at the McCarter Theatre where she taught The Hamlet Project and the Museum of the City of New York where she taught an interdisciplinary playwriting/history course and lead professional development workshops on arts and education. Nicole is a member of the Lincoln Center Director's Lab, the Women's Project 2010-2012 Directors Lab, and a co-founder and curator of Working Theater's Directors Salon. BA History, Yale. MA Interdisciplinary Studies, NYU.

HORSE TRADE THEATER GROUP is a self-sustaining theater development group; with a focus on new work, it has produced a massive quantity of stimulating downtown theater. Horse Trade's Resident Artist Program offers a home to a select group of Independent Theater artists, pooling together a great deal of talent and energy. It is also the home of FRIGID New York - the first and only festival of its kind in New York City.