Quisqueya Celebration Honoring BEES & HONEY and VÁMONOS to be Held This Month

MCC Theater, in collaboration with The Sol Project, and INTAR Theatre will celebrate their productions this spring with a special street event on Saturday May 13, beginning at 1PM and running until 6PM in front of MCC Theater (511 W 52nd Street, New York, NY 10019) on 52nd Street. This event is open to the public. To learn more, please visit: mcctheater.org/quisqueya.

Celebrate the first time two Afro-Dominican playwrights, Guadalís Del Carmen (Bees & Honey, MCC Theater) and Julissa Contreras (Vámonos, INTAR Theatre), are produced off-Broadway in the same season - right across the street from each other - and experience the food, music, and shops representing the island of Quisqueya, led by local community organizations.

The celebration will feature artists Crudo and Danny Peguero; the seasoning company, Pisqueya; César Peña/Comejen Prints; Ramona Ferreyra's Ojala Threads!, Taino indigenous products sourced in the Dominican Republic (@ojalathreads); and food available for purchase by Presidente and Punto Final. Emcee Glorelys Mora and DJ Chico Bembé will join the festivities at 3:30PM with NYC 2023 Poet Laureate Stephanie Pacheco and live music from Afro Dominicano.

The event will also feature tables from MCC Theater, The Sol Project, INTAR Theatre, The New Group (Bernarda's Daughters), Translatinx Network, Violence Intervention Program, Collective for Art Music and Dance, LatinX Playwrights Circle, The Movement Theatre Company, New Georges, Dominican Artists Collective, People's Theatre Project, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and more.

Special thanks to the NYC Mayor's Office of Citywide Event Coordination and Management; Desiree Beach of the Street Activities Permit Office; and to all our neighbors on our beautiful block of West 52nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues for making this unique neighborhood in Northern Hell's Kitchen a new arts corridor.

This program is made possible in part with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

MCC Theater presents Bees & Honey by Guadalís Del Carmen and directed by Melissa Crespo, which began previews on May 4, 2023 with an opening night set for Monday May 22 for a limited run through June 11, 2023 at MCC Theater's Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater.

Inspired by Juan Luis Guerra's Como Abeja Al Panal, Bees & Honey is a Washington Heights love story that follows married couple Manuel and Johaira as they enter new phases in their lives. But as the challenges of life and marriage mount, the young and ambitious couple must answer the age-old question: Is Love enough?

Tickets for Bees & Honey begin at $39 and are available at mcctheater.org/tix/bees-honey. $35 rush tickets and $25 student rush tickets will be available on the day of for each performance.

INTAR Theatre and The Radio Drama Network present Vámonos by Julissa Contreras and directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo, which began previews on April 22, opened on May 2, and will run through May 21 at INTAR Theatre (500 West 52nd St., 4th Floor, New York, NY 10019).

The Torres family of the Bronx are gathering at Juana's apartment to celebrate the christening of her grandson, Christopher. It's November 2002 and a year after 9/11, this hilarious, fun, close-knit Dominican family is navigating a new reality that challenges their sense of security- is America waging war in Iraq? When it's time to party, the Torres' still deliver - there's definitely too much food, adults harangue their kids a little, cousins gossip and argue - and yet the comforts of home fall short. Something is up.

This World Premiere of Julissa Contreras' new play features bilingual dialogue meticulously woven to show the beauty, humor, and uncertainty of a life in this time, place, and comunidad.

Tickets for Vámonos begin at $15 and are available at www.intartheatre.org/now-playing.

ABOUT MCC Theater

MCC Theater is one of New York's leading nonprofit Off-Broadway companies, driven by a mission to provoke conversations that have never happened and otherwise never would. Founded in 1986 by Bob LuPone (1946-2022) and Bernie Telsey, and later joined by co-Artistic Director Will Cantler, as a collective of artists leading peer-based classes to support their own development as actors, writers and directors, MCC fulfills its mission of through the production of world, American, and New York premiere plays and musicals that challenge artists and audiences to confront contemporary personal and social issues, and robust playwright development and education initiatives that foster the next generation of theater artists and students.

MCC Theater's celebrated productions include Kate Nash's Only Gold with a book by Andy Blankenbuehler and Ted Malawer, Donja R. Love's soft; Ross Golan's The Wrong Man; Aziza Barnes' BLKS; Jocelyn Bioh's School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play; Penelope Skinner's The Village Bike; Robert Askins' Hand to God (Broadway transfer; five 2015 Tony Award® nominations including Best Play); John Pollono's Small Engine Repair; Paul Downs Colaizzo's Really Really; Sharr White's The Other Place (Broadway transfer); Jeff Talbott's The Submission (Laurents/Hatcher Award); Neil LaBute's reasons to be pretty (Broadway transfer, three 2009 Tony Award® nominations, including Best Play), Some Girl(s), Fat Pig, The Mercy Seat, and All The Ways To Say I Love You; Michael Weller's Fifty Words; Alexi Kaye Campbell's The Pride; Bryony Lavery's Frozen (Broadway transfer; four 2004 Tony Award® nominations including Best Play, Tony Award® for Best Featured Actor); Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone; Rebecca Gilman's The Glory of Living (2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist); Margaret Edson's Wit (1999 Pulitzer Prize); and musicals including Alice by Heart, Ride the Cyclone, Carrie, and Coraline. Many plays developed and produced by MCC have gone on to productions throughout the country and around the world.

Over the years MCC has worked with thousands of students through the innovative MCC Youth Company, school partnerships, and student matinee programs.

Executive Director Blake West joined the company in 2006. MCC opened the doors to its new home in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, The Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, on January 9, 2019, unifying the company's activities under one roof for the first time and expanding its producing, artist development, and education programming. MCC founding Co-Artistic Director Bob LuPone sadly passed away on August 27, 2022. MCC continues to honor his fierce need for engagement with the art, the artists, and the audience and remember the profound impact he had on everyone who entered its spaces.

ABOUT INTAR THEATER

International Arts Relations (INTAR Theatre), now in its 57th season, is the nation's oldest theatre company dedicated to commissioning, developing and producing plays by Latiné theatre artists at all stages of their careers in English. INTAR Theatre has been at the forefront of promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility for Latiné theatre artists in the mainstream U.S. theatre by offering early professional stage credits, access to membership in the national actor and director unions and reviews in English language media outlets. Successive generations of U.S. Latiné playwrights trained at INTAR under the tutelage of María Irene Fornés, who's signature training methodology has been carried forward to the present by those generations of her students who now train other playwrights nationally. Notable alumni of Fornes' Hispanic American Playwrights Lab at INTAR include Caridad Svich, Migdalia Cruz, Ana Maria Simo, Eduardo Machado and Nilo Cruz, who was the first U.S. Latiné playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. INTAR's Unit 52 lab for young, non-union Latiné actors and stage managers and Max Ferrá Beauty in Direction Fellowship program for young Latiné stage directors, have broken new ground in recent years in inducting new Latiné talent to the professional theatre ranks. INTAR's increasingly digitized historic archives are located at the University of Miami's Cuban Heritage Collection. Visit intartheatre.org for more information.

ABOUT THE SOL PROJECT

The Sol Project is an Obie-award winning national theater initiative dedicated to amplifying the voices of Latiné playwrights in NYC and beyond. Founded by Jacob G. Padrón and driven by an artistic collective, The Sol Project works in partnership with leading theaters to center Latiné dramatists and nurture a growing community of Latiné theater artists. With the writers we champion, The Sol Project aspires to create a bold, timeless, and kaleidoscopic body of work for the new American theater.

The Sol Project launched in 2016 with the world premiere of Alligator by Hilary Bettis in collaboration with New Georges, followed by the New York premieres of Seven Spots on the Sun by Martín Zimmerman (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater) and Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro (The Public Theater). In the fall of 2018, The Sol Project collaborated with Yale Repertory Theatre to produce the world premiere of El Huracán by Charise Castro Smith and in early 2020 partnered with Baltimore Center Stage and The Playwrights Realm to produce the world premiere of Richard & Jane & Dick & Sally by Noah Diaz. In 2022, The Sol Project partnered with Soho Rep for the world premiere of Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members by Mara Vélez Meléndez. And in spring of 2023, The Sol Project will partner with MCC Theater for the world premiere of Bees and Honey by Guadalís Del Carmen, as well as WP Theater and Latinx Playwrights Circle for the Off-Broadway premiere of Sancocho by Christin Eve Cato. In addition to productions, The Sol Project advances its mission by producing a yearly new play festival, SolFest, in partnership with Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, while also supporting writers through readings, workshops, a podcast (SolTalk), and ongoing symposia. In 2023, The Sol Project was awarded an Obie Grant, Off-Broadway's highest honor, for their unprecedented championing and support of Latiné voices in the theater and in recognition of outstanding achievement in Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theater during the 2020-2022 season.

The artistic collective includes Adriana Gaviria (Co-Artistic Director), Rebecca Martínez, David Mendizábal, Jacob G. Padrón (Co-Artistic Director), Julian Ramirez, and Laurie Woolery. George Strus is the Artistic Producer. Isabel Pask is the Producing Associate. Brian Herrera is the Resident Scholar. Stephanie Ybarra is the Resident Dramaturg. Kaelani Burja is the Student Intern and SolFest Dramaturg. For more information, visit solproject.org.

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