Rattlestick Playwrights Theater Announces 2010-2011 Season

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater today announced its roster of plays for 2010-2011, the award-winning company's 16th season. The all world-premiere season will feature provocative new works from Adam Rapp, Heidi Schreck and Florencia Lozano, the first full-length play from award-winning filmmaker Dan Klores, and the debut theatrical outing from the acclaimed singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega.

The season will begin with Dan Klores' first work for the stage - Little Doc, directed by John Gould Rubin. Klores, whose searing and deeply felt documentaries have become modern classics, once again weaves a New York tale in this very personal new work, infused with equal parts humor and heartbreak. Set in 1970's Brooklyn, in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment under the "el" and above a tiny neighborhood bar, Little Doc centers on four childhood friends who find themselves in a life-threatening situation that challenges the validity of the virtues they've adopted from a sex, drugs and rock ‘n' roll culture. Performances will begin June 11, with an official opening night set for June 17.

In Obie Award-winning actress and playwright Heidi Schreck's There Are No More Big Secrets, American expat Gabe hasn't seen Charles and Maxine in years. When he returns to the United Stages with his Russian journalist wife Nina, and their daughter, he seeks refuge for his family in the home of his old friends. Inspired by Heidi's own experience as a reporter in Siberia and St. Petersburg, There Are No More Big Secrets is a metaphysical examination of the limits of friendship. Performances begin September 1. Opening Night is set for September 9.

The second full length play from acclaimed actress and playwright Florencia Lozano, best known to television audiences as Tea Delgado on "One Life to Live," underneathmybed, tells the story of Argentinean parents raising their two daughters in New England and the relationship one daughter has with a small girl believed to be living underneath her bed. Using Spanish and English throughout the play (frequently at the same time-this is a passionate family!), part of the play's appeal is the re-creation of a situation which has become in many ways typical of the U.S.: kids speaking a language different from their parents and the stress of growing up in an immigrant household. Preceded by a workshop production in Buenos Aires, underneathmybed will begin performances on November 3, with opening night set for November 11. Pedro Pascal directs.

Playwright, novelist, screenwriter, filmmaker, and musician Adam Rapp has been a vital and prolific force in the New York theater world for more than a decade. His Hallway Trilogy begins with The Hallway, a ten-character drama that takes place on the evening of November 28th, 1953, the day following the death of EuGene O'Neill. A young actress has been struggling with severe depression (diagnosed as melancholia in those days) and has constructed a myth that EuGene O'Neill, the great playwright, has staged his own death to escape the trappings of fame. Parafin is set on the first evening of the 2003 New York City blackout and concerns a married couple, the wife expecting, the husband addicted to heroin, and his brother's unrequited love for his wife. Light is also a major character in this second part of the trilogy, and what happens in daylight and what happens when night falls are perhaps the most compelling themes. Wolf in the Window is set in 2053 in a disease-free New York. The hallway has been transformed into a museum where young men and women in need of cash are injected with old-fashioned diseases for the amusement of the public. On this night the air-tight glass wall fractures. Hallway Trilogy will begin performances on January 19, 2011, with opening night set for January 27, 2011.

The season will conclude with the first theatrical work from one of the great songwriters of her generation - Suzanne Vega. Suzanne will perform the role of Carson McCullers in Carson McCullers Talks About Love, in which the iconic McCullers talks and reminisces about love and art and life. In trying to explain, she strives to conquer the demons that intrude on the course of love that for her and her characters never runs smoothly. Seamlessly moving from spoken word to song and back again, Vega channels McCullers in a way that reveals the meeting of two souls through a work of art. Directed by Kay Matschullat, Carson McCullers Talks About Love begins performances begin on April 20, 2011, with opening night set for April 28, 2011.

Each play will have the following performance schedule: Monday at 8pm, Wednesday - Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. Memberships are available by calling SmartTix at (212) 868-4444 or online at www.smarttix.com. To learn about the many benefits of membership, as well how to purchase individual tickets, please call the theatre at 212-627-2556. Rattlestick Playwrights Theater is located at 224 Waverly Place (off Seventh Avenue South - between West 11th & Perry Streets).

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater is a multi-award-winning company which has produced over forty world premieres in the past fourteen seasons and was the recipient of the 2007 Ross Wetzsteon Memorial OBIE Award for its work developing new and innovative work. Rattlestick's Advisory Board participates in The Emerging Playwrights Project, which matches a new playwright with an established artist for an experienced eye and creative support. Playwright and artist mentors have included Edward Albee, Jon Robin Baitz, Zoe Caldwell, Arthur Kopit, Craig Lucas, Joe Mantello, Terrence McNally and Marsha Norman. Previous plays include Two Boys in a Bed, Message to Michael, Carpool, Volunteer Man, A Trip to the Beach, Ascendancy, Stuck, Vick's Boy, The Messenger, Saved or Destroyed, Neil's Garden, My Special Friend, Faster, Bliss, St. Crispin's Day, Where We're Born, Five Flights, Boise, Finer Noble Gases, God Hates The Irish: The Ballad of Armless Johnny, Miss Julie, Acts of Mercy: passion-play, Cagelove, It Goes Without Saying, Dark Matters, Stay, American Sligo, Rag and Bone, War, Geometry of Fire, That Pretty Pretty; or The Rape Play, The Amish Project, Killers and Other Family, Post No Bills, Blind, The Aliens, the Off-Broadway GLAAD Award-nominated hit The Last Sunday in June and Craig Wright's The Pavilion (Drama Desk nominee - Outstanding Play of 2005) and Lady (Drama Desk nominee - Outstanding Play of 2008).

Annie Baker's acclaimed, smash-hit play The Aliens, which recently helped earn Baker an Emerging Artist Special Citation from the New York Drama Critics Circle, is currently playing at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, where it was just extended to run through May 29.

Dan Klores, an Award-winning director, has made six films during the last eight years, four of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Following The Boys of 2nd Street Park (2003), Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story (2005), and Crazy Love (2007), which also captured the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best documentary film, he directed the dark operatic comedy, Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks. Klores is also a playwright; his latest play, Little Doc, premieres at New York's Rattlestick Theatre in June. Klores's other films include the Peabody Award-winning Black Magic and Viva Baseball, which both explore his ongoing theme of exclusion from the mainstream. Mr. Klores grew up in Brooklyn. He resides in Manhattan with his wife Abbe and three sons, Jake, Sam and Luke.

Heidi Schreck is a playwright and Obie-winning actor whose plays include Creature, Backwards into China, Stray, Mister Universe, Memorial Day and Spirit Lake. Her play Creature was produced off-Broadway by New Georges and Page 73 this fall, in a production directed by Leigh Silverman. Her work has also been produced or developed by Soho Rep, the Vineyard Theatre, New Georges, The Foundry, Printer's Devil, On the Boards, FronteraFest, the UNO Festival, Consolidated Works and National Public Radio. Heidi was honored to be the 2009 Page 73 Playwriting fellow, where she first developed Big Secrets.

Florencia Lozano attended Brown University where she majored in Comparative Literature and wrote her first full-length play, entitled Under Her Breath, from which three monologues were published by Heinemann press in a collection called Monologues by Women for Women. Two of her ten-minute plays, Bitch and Charlie Go Back to Charlie's House and Sheila, Jack, Clare Danes, and the Man on the Roof, were then produced at LAByrinth Theatre Company. She was later invited to write and perform a rant at Joe's Pub.

Adam Rapp has been the recipient of the Herbert & Patricia Brodkin Scholarship, two Lincoln Center le Compte du Nouy Awards, a fellowship to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwrighting, a 2000 Suite Residency with Mabou Mines, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights. A graduate of Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, Mr. Rapp also completed a two-year fellowship at Juilliard where his play Dreams of the Salthorse was produced. Rattlestick first produced Adam's Faster in 2002, followed by Finer Noble Gases in 2004 and American Sligo in 2007. His play Red Light Winter was seen Off-Broadway in the 2005-2006 season, and Essential Self-Defense debuted at Playwrights Horizons in March 2007. The World Premiere of Nocturne was produced by the A.R.T.'s New Stages Program and received Boston's Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script as well as Best New Play by the Independent Reviewers of New England. The trilogy of The Hallway, Parafin, and Wolf in the Window would be his fourth, fifth, and sixth productions by Rattlestick.
Suzanne Vega began playing guitar at age 11 and as a teenager began writing songs, influenced by her computer systems analyst mother and Puerto Rican writer stepfather and the multicultural music they played, from Motown, folk and cool jazz to Beatles pop and bossa nova. After attending the High School for the Performing Arts, she went on to Barnard College where she studied literature and first assumed the character of Carson McCullers in an acting class. She was signed in 1984 by the record label A&M. When her "Luka" hit #3 pop in 1987, earning her three Grammy nominations, including for Record of the Year, Vega ushered in a female, acoustic, folk-pop singer-songwriter movement. Vega co-produced a follow-up album, 1990's Days Of Open Hand, for which she won a Best Album Package Grammy as a co-designer. In 1999, The Passionate Eye: The Collected Writings Of Suzanne Vega, a volume of poems, lyrics, essays, journalistic pieces and more was published by Spike/Avon Books.

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