Maggie Siff Cast In Liz Duffy Adams's OR, Previews 10/29 At Women's Project

Women's Project, truly on a roll in its 32nd year (and not looking a day over 29!) of producing plays written and directed by women, has signed Maggie Siff, one of the acclaimed ensemble of actors in the hit, third-season TV series "Mad Men," to play Aphra Behn in Liz Duffy Adams's three-hander Or, directed by Wendy McClellan.

(PLEASE NOTE, the title of Or, includes the comma, such as "Or,")

Or ,, Ms. Adams's comedy about Aphra Behn trying to get out of the spy trade and into show biz, also features Kelly Hutchinson and Andy Paris. Or, begins previews October 29, opens November 3 for a run through November 22 at Women's Project, 424 West 55th Street.

Other news from Women's Project is the selection of Lascivious Something for its third main stage show of the season. Lascivious Something is Sheila Callaghan's tale of an American and his young Greek bride who escape to an island, plant a small vineyard and are visited by an uninvited, fractious American woman. Lascivious Something, presented in association with Cherry Lane Theatre, is directed by Daniella Topol and runs May 2 through June 6.

[] Maggie Siff plays department store heiress Rachel Menken in "Mad Man" and Aphra Behn in Or,

Women's Project's second play of the new season is Smudge by a staff writer of NBC's "Parks & Recreation" and former Jon Stewart "Daily Show" staff writer Rachel Axler. Smudge, directed by Pam MacKinnon, is a dark comedy in which a hopeful young couple gives birth to a smudge. Smudge previews January3, opens January 11 and runs through February 7.

Single are $52.00 and are on sale now at www.Telecharge.com or 212.239.6200. Member Tickets $15.00 at membership@womensproject.org or 212.765.2105. For groups of nine or more, tickets are $25.00 at membership@womensproject.org or 212.765.2105.

Details, Details

Women's Project 2009-2010 Season
Women's Project Mainstage World Premiere

World Premiere

Or,* by Liz Duffy Adams, directed by Wendy McClellan
October 29 - November 22 at Women's Project, 424 West 55th Street
Designed by Jennifer Moeller (sets), Andrea Lauer (costumes), Deb Sullivan (lights), and Elizabeth Rhodes (sound).

Aphra Behn is getting out of the spy trade and into show biz, if she can only write her play without interruptions from her love life - celebrity Nell Gwynne, King Charles II, and double-agent William Scott, among others. While war rages and Aphra and her friends celebrate free love, cross-dressing and pastoral lyricism, the 1660s start to look a lot like the 1960s. Verse or prose, now or then, love or death... and a lot of kissing.

*PLEASE NOTE, the title of Or, includes the comma, such as "Or,"

Playwright Liz Duffy Adams is a WP Lab alumna, a New Dramatists alumna (2001-2008) and a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award, a Will Glickman Award, a Frederick Loewe Award in Music Theatre, a Weston Playhouse Music Theater Award, and a commission from Children's Theater Company, Minneapolis. Her work has been written, produced, or developed at the Humana Festival, Portland Center Stage, Portland Stage Company, Syracuse Stage, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, New Georges, Shotgun Players, Moxie Theater, Clubbed Thumb, and Crowded Fire Theater among other organizations. Publications include Poodle With Guitar And Dark Glasses in Applause's "Best American Short Plays 2000-2001," numerous short plays and monologues in anthologies from Heinemann and Smith & Kraus, and several plays published by Playscripts, Inc. Adams was profiled in American Theatre magazine's December 2004 issue. BFA: NYU's Experimental Theater Wing; MFA: Yale School of Drama.

Wendy McClellan is a WP Lab member and a New York-based director who has developed and directed new American plays in New York and across the country. Her world premiere credits include Deborah Stein's Wallflower (Stages Repertory Theatre, Houston), Laurie Brook's Brave No World (The Kennedy Center), Jennifer Maisel's Birds (Rorschach Theatre, DC) and Goody f-ing Two-Shoes (Actors Theatre of Louisville). Developmental work in New York includes directing the Loewe Award Workshops of two new musicals at New Dramatists. The first, Liz Duffy Adams and John Hodian's The Listener of Junk City, is a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, rock-opera. The second, Runway 69 by Erin Kamler and Carson Kreitzer, is a Chicago-in-the-making about the "clean up" of Times Square in the mid-90's. Also at New Dramatists, she developed Sarah Hammond's House on Stilts and Liz Duffy Adams's Or. With Mabou Mines Suite she directed the workshop of Julia Pearlstein's commedia play Rat Bastards, and with New Georges she led a workshop of Olga Humphrey's restoration farce Cornbury, among others. She directed Sarah Hammond's Green Girl in 2008's SPF at The Public.

World Premiere

Smudge
By Rachel Axler, directed by Pam MacKinnon
January 3 - February 7 at Women's Project, 424 West 55th Street

The world premiere of a dark comedy about the changing face of the American family and the limits of love and cheesecake, as a hopeful young couple gives birth to a smudge.

Rachel Axler is a playwright and Emmy-winning television writer. Her play, Archaeology, premiered at The Kitchen Theatre in 2009. Other plays of hers have been developed through The Lark Play Development Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Playwrights Foundation and the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. Rachel has held fellowships at The Dramatists Guild and The Lark, and is currently working on commissioned plays for South Coast Rep and Lincoln Center Theater. Humor pieces of hers have been published in The New York Times, In Character and two editions of Monologues for Women, By Women. For television, Rachel wrote for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for several years, where she received the 2006 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program and three Writers Guild Award nominations. She now writes for Parks and Recreation on NBC. Rachel received her BA from Williams College and her MFA in Playwriting from UCSD. Member: Dramatists Guild, Writers Guild of America.

Pam MacKinnon most recently directed world premieres of Jason Grote's Maria/Stuart (Woolly Mammoth) and Richard Greenberg's Our Mother's Brief Affair (South Coast Rep); productions of Adrian Hall's adaptation of Penn Warren's All The King's Men (Intiman), Lanford Wilson's Burn This (Juilliard) and Richard Dresser's Below the Belt (ACT-Seattle). She also continued her longstanding collaboration with Edward Albee directing A Delicate Balance (Arena Stage). New York productions include Edward Albee's Peter and Jerry (Second Stage); Edward Albee's Occupant (Signature); Itamar Moses' The Four of Us (MTC); Itamar Moses' Bach at Leipzig (NYTW); Sheri Wilner's Father Joy (SPF), John Fugelsang's All the Wrong Reasons (NYTW); Adam Bock's Medea Eats (Clubbed Thumb), Gina Gionfriddo's U.S. Drag (Clubbed Thumb) and Erin Courtney's AlIce The Magnet (Clubbed Thumb). Other recent productions include the premiere of Roberto Aguire Sacasa's Good Boys and True (Steppenwolf), Bruce Norris' The Unmentionables (Woolly Mammoth), David Mamet's Romance (Goodman), Edward Albee's The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? (Alley and Vienna), Edward Albee's Play About The Baby (Philadelphia and Goodman) and Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest (Juilliard). She is currently in preproduction for three world premiere productions in New York: Cusi Cram's A Lifetime Burning (Primary Stages) with Jennifer Westfeldt; and Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park (Playwrights Horizons) as well as a production of John Patrick Shanley's Savage in Limbo (Juilliard). Pam is an Affliated Artist with Clubbed Thumb, a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect and a Drama League alumna.

World Premiere presented by Women's Project and Cherry Lane Theatre

Lascivious Something by Sheila Callaghan, directed by Daniella Tool
May 2 - June 6 at Women's Project, 424 West 55th Street.

An American and his young Greek bride escape to an island and plant a small vineyard. Their harvest ripens, and a fractious American woman arrives uninvited to stir up passions at their first tasting.

Sheila Callaghan's plays have been produced and developed with Soho Rep, Playwright's Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Clubbed Thumb, The LARK, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, New Georges, Woolly Mammoth, and Rattlestick Playwright's Theatre, among others. Ms. Callaghan is the recipient of the Princess Grace Award for emerging artists, a Jerome Fellowship from the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis, a MacDowell Residency, a 2005 Cherry Lane Mentorship Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, and the prestigious Whiting Award. She has received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, and the MAP Foundation. Her plays have been produced internationally in New Zealand, Norway, Germany, and the Czech Republic. She has been commissioned by Playwright's Horizons, South Coast Repertory, The Playwright's Foundation, Clubbed Thumb, and EST/Sloan. Her full-length plays include Scab, Crawl, Fade to White, Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake), We Are Not These Hands, Dead City, Kate Crackernuts, That Pretty Pretty; or The Rape Play, and Fever/Dream. Several of her plays are published by Playscripts.com and Samuel French, and her monologues can be found in various anthologies. Ms. Callagahn is a resident artist at HERE Arts Center and a member of the Obie winning playwright's organization 13P. She is also a resident of New Dramatists. Currently, Ms. Callaghan is a writer on the Showtime series The United States of Tara.

Daneilla Topol's NY credits include: Trista Baldwin's Sand (Women's Project), Sheila Callaghan's Dead City (New Georges), Judith Thompson's Palace of the End (Epic Theatre), Susan Yankowitz's Night Sky (Baruch Performing Arts Center/Power Productions), Nicki Bloom's Tender (Summer Play Festival), Leslie Ayvazian's Carol and Jill (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Jakob Holder's Housebreaking (Cherry Lane Mentor Project), Zakiyyah Alexander's Sick? (Summer Play Festival), Peter Gil-Sheridan's Topsy Turvy Mouse (Cherry Lane Mentor Project), and Stanton Wood's Snow Queen (Urban Stages). She has directed readings and workshops for a number of NY companies including the Lark, New York Theatre Workshop, New Dramatists, NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, Playwrights Horizons, Primary Stages, the Public, and the Roundabout. Regionally, she has most recently directed productions of Caridad Svich's Instructions for Breathing (Passage Theatre, NJ), Kim Oler, Alison Hubbard, and Sean Hartley's world premiere musical of Little Women (Village Theatre, WA) and Trista Baldwin's Forgetting (Playwrights Center/Workhaus Collective, MN) and has directed workshops of musicals at Goodspeed Musicals and Barrington Stage in conjunction with NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon's directing program, Daniella has been the Artistic Program Director at the Lark Play Development Center, the New Works Program Director at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre, and the Associate Producing Director of City Theatre. She is currently working as a resident artist at HERE developing a new multi-media piece on floods with Sheila Callaghan, Katie Down, Leah Gelpe, Mimi Lien, and Tyler Micoleau. Upcoming productions include: Stretch (People's Light and Theatre Company), Sarita (Fordham University), and a workshop of Rosa (Richard Rodgers Award Winner - presentations at The Public Theatre and Queens Theatre in the Park).

Also on Women's Project's agenda is a Hothouse workshop production of Talk Soon by Joy Tomasko, directed by Meiyin Wang with choreography by Martha Mason and new media visual design by Wendy Richmond. It will perform in March 2010.

Hothouse is a development series for new works created by Women's Project Lab Artists. Commissioned by Women's Project with the support of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Talk Soon is a multi-disciplinary performance piece that examines how people connect distances and establish identity in the digital age. In both the natural and the digital worlds, the story follows the accidental death of a woman and her online afterlife.

Women's Project (WP) produces theater created by women, providing a forum for women's perspectives on political, social, and cultural topics. Now under the direction of Producing Artistic Director Julie Crosby, WP was founded in 1978 by Julia Miles to address the conspicuous under-representation of women theater artists in the professional theater. During its 32 years, countless artists have achieved significant recognition through WP productions, including Anne Bogart, Eve Ensler, Maria Irene Fornes, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Leigh Silverman, and Anna Deavere Smith, among the many. WP has staged over 600 mainstage productions and developmental projects, and published ten anthologies of plays by women. In 1998, WP purchased a historic off-Broadway venue on Manhattan's West 55th Street, making WP the first and only women's theater company to hold the keys to its own stage.

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.