BARRING THE UNFORESEEN, Mike Daisey's terrifying new monologue about ghost stories and why we tell them, will play a special, limited engagement the week of Halloween. Created and performed by Mike Daisey and directed by Jean-Michele Gregory, the show begins performances at IRT on Tuesday, October 26th.
Mike Daisey has been called "the master storyteller...one of the finest solo performers of his generation" by the New York Times. In BARRING THE UNFORESEEN he returns to his roots in a monologue told from a vast and unknowable northern province called childhood. Woven together from Maine ghost stories, the history of spiritualism, H.P. Lovecraft's tortured life, and the unspeakable dread lurking under your bed, Daisey creates a monologue about why we tell ghost stories, and the precious, terrifying gifts they bring us. Unsettling and inquisitive, he embarks on a journey with a daring audience to come back with answers.
Mike Daisey's work has earned him international acclaim as the preeminent American monologuist for our time with his groundbreaking monologues which weave together autobiography, gonzo journalism, and unscripted performance to tell hilarious and heartbreaking stories that cut to the bone, exposing secret histories and unexpected connections. His monologues include last season's critically acclaimed The Last Cargo Cult, the controversial How Theater Failed America, the six-hour epic Great Men of Genius, the unrepeatable series All Stories Are Fiction, and his latest, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. He has performed across five continents, ranging from Off-Broadway at
The Public Theater to remote islands in the South Pacific, from the Sydney Opera House to abandoned theaters in post-Communist Tajikistan. He's been a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, as well as a commentator and contributor to WIRED,
Vanity Fair, Slate, Salon, NPR and the BBC. His first film, Layover, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival this year, and a feature film of his monologue If You See Something Say Something is currently in post production. His second book, Rough Magic, a collected anthology of his monologues, will be published in 2011. He has been nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award, two Drama League Awards, and is the recipient of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, four Seattle Times Footlight Awards, the Sloan Foundation's Galileo Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship.
Jean-Michele Gregory works as a director, editor, and dramaturg, focusing on extemporaneous theatrical works that live in the moment they are told. Working primarily with solo artists, for the last decade she has collaborated with monologist
Mike Daisey, directing at venues across the globe including the
Public Theater, The Sydney Opera House,
Yale Repertory Theatre, the Cherry Lane Theater, the Under the Radar Festival, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, the
Barrow Street Theatre, Chicago's Museum for Contemporary Art,
American Repertory Theatre, the Spoleto Festival,
Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Noorderzon Festival,
Intiman Theatre, Performance Space 122, the T:BA Festival, and many more. She has also directed New York storyteller
Martin Dockery (Wanderlust, The Surprise) and the Seattle-based performer and writer Suz
Anne Morrison (Yoga Bitch, Optimism). Her productions have received four Seattle Times Footlight Awards (21 Dog Years, The Ugly American, Monopoly!, The Last Cargo Cult), the Bay Area Critics Circle Award (Great Men of Genius), and nominations from the Drama League and Outer Critics Circle (If You See Something Say Something).
BARRING THE UNFORESEEN is presented by IRT as part of its 3B Development Series. Tucked away in the old Archive Building in Greenwich Village NYC, IRT is a grassroots theater development laboratory providing space and community for a new generation of artists. The 3B Development Series is a curated residency program that seeks to fill the gap in New York's theater ecology between readings and full productions, offering radically affordable rehearsal/production space for investigating and incubating new works.
Kori Rushton and
Ben Vershbow, curators.
BARRING THE UNFORESEEN will play October 26 - October 31.
Schedule: Nightly @ 8:00 PM.
IRT is located at 154 Christopher Street (3rd floor, #3B).
Tickets are $25 and can be purchased online at www.brownpapertickets.com or at the door one hour before curtain.
For more information, please visit irttheater.org or mikedaisey.com.
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