TNC's 40th Street Theater Tour ELECTION SELECTION, OR YOU BET! Begins in August

Theater for the New City's award-winning Street Theater Company will open its 40th annual tour August 6 with "Election Selection, or You Bet!," a rip-roaring musical in which three everyday New Yorkers are galvanized into community activists. Free performances will tour City streets, parks and playgrounds throughout the five boroughs through September 18. Book, lyrics and direction are by Crystal Field; the musical score is composed and arranged by Joseph Vernon Banks. (Schedule follows at bottom of this document.)

The musical tells an election season story of three New Yorkers. An irascible, high-strung grandmother is sure that the world is doomed, blaming mass terrorism, radiation, global warming, drone strikes, the failure of the Occupy Movement and exploitation of third world countries. She is dragged to a polling place by her two grandchildren because she is determined not to vote, declaring "I won't get down in the dirt with those guys." Next is an eager-to-vote, right-wing, African American conservative, whose topsy-turvy views hold slavery, the oppression of his people, as the historical backbone of America's financial wealth. He opposes affirmative action as demeaning to a worker's reputation. Finally, there is a neighborhood guy, a survivor of the 2008 Great Recession, who works twelve hours a day at three part-time jobs to just about make ends meet. He has "no time for politics," but has snagged a one-day perk as a poll worker in the primary.

At the polling place, their irreconcilable political views are mirrored in the lineup of voters, which leads to loud altercations. The scanning machines stop working, the polling place is closed and all the votes are lost.

The three unlikely heroes are thereupon taken on a fast-paced time-trip through struggles of American history, from Shay's Rebellion to slave rebellions to the 60's draft card burnings to Occupy Wall Street (which all seemed to end in failure but actually preceded much social change). They mature into community activists as they encounter people whose situations call for local action. These include a mother whose transgender child is bullied at school, a gay man afraid to tell his associates that he is married to Fred, a Muslim mother who is afraid to walk the streets in her headscarf, and a pregnant mother who fears for her unborn child's future in a gun-filled society that's devoted to riches and power for the privileged. Our heroes are challenged to "think local" during an election when national candidates are like cartoon characters: the country is rolling with punches exchanged between Wonder Woman and The Joker, who duke it out for the presidential heavyweight title. All three of our heroes mature into community activists, finding a happy place on society's winning side through neighbor-to-neighbor recruitment. They realize they are a part of a movement to change the World of Greed into a World of Creed that heeds the Plead of Need.

The production will be staged with an elaborate assemblage of trap doors, giant puppets, smoke machines, masks, original choreography and a huge (9' x 12') running screen or "cranky" providing continuous movement behind the actors. The company of 30 actors, twelve crew members, two assistant directors and five live musicians (led by the composer at the keyboard) will share the challenge of performing outside and holding a large, non-captive audience. The music will vary in style from Bossa Nova to Hip Hop to Musical Comedy to Gilbert & Sullivan. The play is a bouncy joyride through the undulations of the body politic, with astute commentary couched in satire, song and slapstick.

TNC's free street Theater Productions are delightfully suited for family audiences, since complex social issues are often presented through children's allegories, with children and neighborhood people as the heroes.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Author/director Crystal Field began writing street theater in 1968 as a member of Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She wrote and performed her own outdoor theater pieces against the Vietnam War and also curated and performed many poetry programs for the Philadelphia Public Schools. There she found tremendous enthusiasm and comprehension on the part of poor and minority students for both modern and classical poetry when presented in a context of relevancy to current issues. She realized that for poetry to find its true audience, the bonds of authoritarian criticism must and can be transcended. Her earliest New York street productions were playlets written in Philadelphia and performed on the flatbed truck of Bread and Puppet Theater in Central Park. Peter Schumann, director of that troupe, was her first NY artistic supporter.

In 1971, Ms. Field became a protégé of Robert Nichols, founder of the Judson Poets Theater in Manhattan. It is an interesting historic note that "The Expressway" by Robert Nichols, directed by Crystal Field (a Street theater satire about Robert Moses' plan for a throughway to run across Little Italy from the West Side Highway to the FDR Drive). It was actually the first production of Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. Nichols wrote street theater plays for TNC in its early years, but as time went on, wrote scenarios and only the first lines of songs, leaving Field to "fill in the blanks." When Nichols announced his retirement to Vermont in 1975, he urged Field to "write your own." The undertaking, while stressful at first, became the impetus for her to express her own topical political philosophy and to immerse her plays in that special brand of humor referred to often as "that brainy slapstick." Her first complete work was "Mama Liberty's Bicentennial Party" (1976), in honor of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution.

Field has written and directed a completely new opera for the TNC Street Theater company each successive year. She collaborated for eleven years with composer Mark Hardwick, whose "Pump Boys and Dinettes" and "Oil City Symphony" were inspired by his street theater work with Ms. Field. At the time of his death from AIDS in 1994, he was writing a clown musical with Field called "On the Road," which was never finished. One long-running actor in TNC street theater was Tim Robbins, who was a member of the company for six years in the 1980s, from age twelve to 18.

The Village Halloween Parade, which TNC produced single-handedly for the Parade's first two years, grew out of the procession which preceded each Street Theater production. Ralph Lee, who created the Parade with Ms. Field, was chief designer for TNC's Street Theater for four years before the Village Halloween Parade began.

Field has also written for TNC's annual Halloween Ball and for an annual Yuletime pageant that was performed outdoors for 2,000 children on the Saturday before Christmas. She has written two full-length indoor plays, "Upstate" and "One Director Against His Cast." She is Executive Director of TNC.

Composer Joseph-Vernon Banks has written original music for the TNC street Theater Productions "Teach it Right, or Right to Teach," "EMERGENCY!!! or The World Takes A Selfie," "99% "Reduced Fat, or, You Can Bank On Us," "Bamboozled, or the Real Reality Show," "Tap Dance," "State Of The Union," "The Patients Are Running The Asylum," "Bio-Tech," "Code Orange: on the M15," "Social Insecurity," "Buckle My Shoe" and "Gone Fission: Alternative Power," all with book and lyrics by Crystal Field. His other TNC productions include music and lyrics for "Life's Too Short To Cry" by Michael Vazquez. His awards include a Meet The Composer Grant, the ASCAP Special Awards Program, and a fellowship from the Tisch Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at NYU. His musical "Girlfriends!" premiered at The Goodspeed Opera House. He has been a composer-in-residence in The Tribeca Performing Arts Center Work and Show Series and is a member of The Dramatists Guild.

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