New Mexico Actors Lab to Open 2025 Season With Mike Lew's BIKE AMERICA

Emily Rankin, the new Artistic Director of New Mexico Actors Lab, is set to direct the 2025 season opening production of Mike Lew's Bike America, which opens May 1 and runs through May 18.

Tickets are now on sale at the NMAL website, . Flex Passes are $160 (five shows or admissions for the price of four). Individual tickets are $40, with discounted tickets (see website for details) and two preview performances costing $20. If seats are available, $5 rush tickets will go on sale five minutes before each performance. All performances will be held at NMAL's permanent home, the Lab Theater, located at 1213 B Parkway Drive in Santa Fe - one block from Meow Wolf. Thursday- Saturday performances begin at 7:30 p.m. Sunday performances begin at 2 p.m.

Award-winning playwright, Mike Lew's Bike America is a wildly theatrical picaresque journey that crams the entire continent onto one stage. The play pedals the audience along a cross-country bike trip from Boston to California, with stops in big cities and small towns along the way. Heroine Penny is looking to bring more meaning into her life, so she drops her clingy boyfriend in Beantown and takes off for Santa Barbara. Along the way she befriends a colorful crew of bikers and develops insights on our cultural obsession with happiness. Rankin will direct a cast led by Joey Beth Gilbert, and featuring Jeff Dolecek, Josh Horton, Rod Harrison, Ali Marin, Dylan Marshall, and Asiah Thomas-Mandlman.

Rankin is a director, actor, and artist who has been an active theatre maker for over twenty years. After receiving her BFA in Theatre Directing and Psychology, she worked extensively in Austin, TX, both in film production and in theatre. There, she helped bring to life shows like Whirligig Theatre's Deus Ex Machina, a choose-your-own-adventure based on the Oresteia, and Penfold Theatre's Murder on the Rails, a murder mystery series performed aboard the Austin Steam Train. She worked with companies like Bottle Alley, Generic Ensemble Company, and The Hidden Room to create site-specific, devised, and original practice works, in addition to more traditional theatre. In 2018 she relocated to Santa Fe, where she worked with Meow Wolf, serving as a project manager and production coordinator for their Interactive and Entertainment divisions, specializing in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experiences for Convergence Station in Denver. Since then, she's worked regularly with Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, creating immersive, interactive performance. She's also been a regular fixture in Santa Fe's theatre scene, working with companies like the Santa Fe Playhouse, where she twice served as interim production manager, Santa Fe Classic Theater, Incite Shakespeare Company, Ironweed, Almost Adults, Blue Raven, and The New Mexico Actors Lab, where she most recently directed a reading of Rosemary Zibart's Dizzy and Love and appeared in Oleanna and Heroes of the Fourth Turning.