Brooklyn's Brave New World Rep Announces New Season Of Brave New Works

Brave New World Repertory Theatre, the Brooklyn-based company that first won acclaim with To Kill A Mockingbird staged on the front porches of Victorian Flatbush in 2005, announces a new generation of Brave New Works for BNW's 15th anniversary season.

Brave New Works 2018: Ditmas Park, is an initiative designed to celebrate the home community where many of the company members live, and where BNW's break-out, site-specific production of To Kill a Mockingbird was first seen by over 2,000 people on one night in 2005. The concept for Brave New Works 2018 is to "act locally, think globally," says BNW founder/producing artistic director Claire Beckman. "All are welcome but this initiative allows our Ditmas/Flatbush neighbors to enjoy a series of five new works by local writers without having to take a subway, bus or Uber." The readings run once a month from January 20 to May 5.

Four Ditmas Park home owners and one local family-run restaurant, Cinco de Mayo, are hosting readings of these new plays, preceded by a cocktail half-hour with wine and light fare.

Tickets are $18 with addresses of the venues sent by email upon receipt of purchase. Seating is general admission. Ticket information here.

The stories are set in India, Brooklyn, the Midwest, the Ukraine and the thoughtful mind of a young Mexican-American woman. Not only do they reflect Ditmas Park's global community, but as a collective, they amplify that diversity in astonishing, heartfelt, and often hilarious ways. Brave New Works 2019 is slated for Bedford-Stuyvesant next year.

*January 20
A Muslim in the Midst
Written and directed by Anand Rao
Featuring: Ram Kanneganti, Dipti Mehta, Jay Nambiar,
Deeksha Ketkar, and Nachiketh Anand, John Morgan (Stage Directions)

*February 24
Last Night and the Night Before (2017 Kilroy's List)
By Donnetta Lavinia Grays,
Directed by Tamilla Woodard
Featuring: Kara e.Young, Bianca L. Jones, Latoya Edwards, Jon Michael Reese, Rian Gordon, Sandra Williams (Stage Directions)

*March 17
In Search of...Sasquatch
By Robert Kerr
Directed by Cynthia Babak
Featuring: Chip Brenner, Eleanor Ruth, Ian Whitt, Sandra Mills Scott,
Caroline Ryburn (Stage Directions)

*April 14
Tiny Houses
by Stefanie Zadravec
Directed by May Adrales
Featuring: Stuart Zagnit, Kate Abruzzese, Claire Beckman, Leegrid Stevens, Franny Silverman, Nick Lehane, Chris Lindsay-Abaire

*May 5
From Clay and Water
by Emely Zepeda
Directed by Rebecca Martinez
Featuring: Yadira de la Riva, Caroline Ryburn, Craig Grant

For the past 15 years, Brooklyn's Brave New World Rep has carved out a site-specific niche presenting re-envisioned classics and works by Brooklyn playwrights. Recent work includes free performances of Elmer Rice's Street Scene, in which the company closed off a street in Park Slope and used a tenement building and adjacent street as the stage, and Orson Welles' Moby Dick-Rehearsed, presented on a barge in Red Hook. This past summer (2017), BNW presented The Plantation, a bold and acclaimed new adaptation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, a post-Civil War story set after emancipation but before the onset of Jim Crow. Chekhov's Russian serfs become American freed men and women in this immersive production performed in The Commanding Officer's House on Governors Island.

The company earned its reputation of delivering unexpectedly immersive works to communities all around Brooklyn, beginning with its 2005 production of To Kill a Mockingbird, presented on the front porches and sidewalks of a tree-lined Ditmas Park street. Other work includes On The Waterfront on a Brooklyn barge that toured the waterfronts of New York Bay, The Tempest on the beach and boardwalk in Coney Island, and The Crucible by lantern light for two weeks at The Old Stone House in Park Slope. Based in Brooklyn, Brave New World Repertory has been a featured favorite of Celebrate Brooklyn at the Prospect Park band shell, presenting acclaimed productions of Fahrenheit 451, The Great White Hope and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, based on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

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