SOCIETY Theatre Company to Debut ENTANGLED at HERE Arts Center This March

SOCIETY Theatre Company, a collective of theatre makers creating new research-driven, radically collaborative works, will present the World Premiere of Entangled: 12 Scenes in a Circle K off the I-40 in New Mexico, written by Mona Mansour (The Vagrant Trilogy at The Public) and Emily Zemba (Superstitions/Pool Plays at the New Ohio) directed by Scott Ilingworth (Verbatim Salon; Associate Chair of the Graduate Acting Program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts) in the Mainstage at HERE Arts Center (145 6th Ave, New York, NY 10013), March 11-29. Members of the press are invited to attend from March 12th on.

Off the I-40 in the American southwest sits a Circle K gas station where something strange is happening: Time and space shift, happy couples suddenly break up, and people disappear for days after stepping into the tiny bathroom. Is this place a portal, tied to the decades of deathly scientific research just a few miles away? In this play - born from ensemble research, debate, and playwright-driven improvisation - theories of free will and quantum science play out in massive dance parties and micro emotional exchanges that may have epic implications.

The cast will feature Brian Bock (Events with The Hearth), Hiram Delgado (Take Me Out on Broadway), Christy Escobar (Wil Eno's Gnit with Theatre for a New Audience), Leslie Fray (The Girls on the Bus on HBO), Annie Fox (Problems Between Sisters with Studio Theatre), Meredith Garretson (Resident Alien on USA Network), Rosa Gilmore (The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu), Caroline Grogan (Are the Bennet Girls Okay? and Arcadia with Bedlam), Stephanie Lane (Sleep No More with Punchdrunk), Keren Lugo (Give Me Carmelita Tropicana at Soho Rep), Joshua David Robinson (Radio Downtown with The Civillians), Alexandra Templer (Only Murders in the Building on Hulu), and Shpend Xani (The Vagrant Trilogy at Mosaic, D.C). The creative team includes Set Design by Jacob Bers (Assistant Scenic Designer with The Dots), Lighting Design by Lauren Nychelle (We the People of the 100 Acre Woods at Lincoln Center), Costume Design by Sandrina Sparagna (MFA at NYU Tisch), and Sound Design by Avi Amon (Danger and Opportunity at East Village Basement).

Entangled: 12 Scenes in a Circle K off the I-40 in New Mexico is being presented as part of HERE Hosts, a performance series of new work from extraordinary artists, ensembles, and independent companies working in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary form in which HERE engages artists who share values alignment and demonstrate high creative kinship.

Performances will take place on:

Wednesday, March 11 at 8:30pm (Preview)

Thursday, March 12 at 8:30pm (Opening Night)

Friday, March 13 at 8:30pm

Saturday, March 14 at 8:30pm

Sunday, March 15 at 4pm

Wednesday, March 18 at 8:30pm

Thursday, March 19 at 8:30pm

Friday, March 20 at 8:30pm

Saturday, March 21 at 8:30pm

Sunday, March 22 at 4pm

Wednesday, March 25 at 8:30pm

Thursday, March 26 at 8:30pm

Friday, March 27 at 8:30pm

Saturday, March 28 at 8:30 PM

Tickets ($35) are available for advance purchase at https://here.org/shows/entangled/. The performance will run approximately 100 minutes, with no intermission.

Mona Mansour (Playwright) grew up in a Southern California suburb, the daughter of a Lebanese immigrant father and American mother from Seattle. Her earliest obsessions included the kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst and the various battles of World War II. Global politics were brought inside when various cousins, uncles and aunties came to live with the family during the Lebanese Civil War. In college, an improv class led her to a stint in the Groundlings Sunday Company, which gave her a visceral first taste of writing. Her first play, Me and the S.L.A, turned a childhood obsession into a solo play about a kidnapped heiress, urban terrorists, and the nature of brainwashing. Her commitment to theater deepened after a move to New York in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks, when the Middle Eastern theater community was fired up by an urgent need to change the narrative around Arab-Americans. The questions around her own father, who left Lebanon by choice, took her to his village in Southern Lebanon, and an examination of the "villages'' next to it - the Palestinian camps Mieh-Mieh and Ain El Hilweh. This notion of displacement became a central theme she began to explore and inspired her to create the play Urge for Going in what would become The Vagrant Trilogy, which premiered at Mosaic in Washington, D.C. in June 2018 and then made its NYC debut at The Public Theater (2022) directed by Mark Wing-Davey. In 2019, Mona formed SOCIETY, with Scott Illingworth and Tim Nicolai. Their first production, Beginning Days of True Jubilation, was performed on Zoom in August 2020. The play, with its cast of 10, explores the absurdity, chaos and psychic cost of a fictitious start-up. It was remounted in person in July 2022 at the New Ohio Theatre, in rep with Emily Zemba's The Strangers Came Today. Other credits: Unseen (Mosaic and OSF), The Way West (Labyrinth, Steppenwolf), We Swim We Talk We Go To War (Golden Thread) and Dressing (co-written with Tala Manassah) part of Facing Our Truths: Short Plays About Trayvon, Race, and Privilege, commissioned by the New Black Festival. Beautiful Little Fool, a musical co-written with singer-composer Hannah Corneau and directed by Michael Greif, recently made its world premiere at Southwark Playhouse in London.. Her plays have been translated into Arabic, Italian, Romanian and Hungarian. www.monamansour.com

Emily Zemba (Playwright) is a Brooklyn-based playwright hailing from Old Lyme on the Southeastern CT shoreline. The production of Emily's play Superstitions - as part of The Pool 2021 - was praised by New York Magazine as "Elegant and weird" and "a return to what Off-Off was originally for." The Strangers Came Today, conceived with Society, premiered in rep with Mona's BDOTJ at New Ohio in summer 2022. Some of Emily's other plays include Deer and The Lovers (First Floor Theater), Clockwork (Local Lab), On Loss and Mice and Monsters and Love (LPAC), Have You Been There? (Rattlestick F*ck!ng Good Plays Festival, Williamstown Prof. Training Co), Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don't Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time (Manhattanville University, Yale Cab), and the commissioned audio walking tour Of a Mind: OKC. Her work has been developed with support of Peoples Light Theater, OKC Rep, Boston Court Pasadena, ANT Fest, Exquisite Corpse Company, Great Plains Theater Conference, The Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Poland), Two River Theater's Emerging Writers Group, and New York Stage and Film Filmmakers Lab, and more. She is an affiliated artist with New Georges and The Playwrights Center. Emily's short film Out of Office was an official selection of the 2021 Chattanooga Film Festival (co-directed with Emma Wiseman). She has taught playwriting at Wesleyan University, and Manhattanville College. BA: Sarah Lawrence; MFA: Yale School of Drama | www.emilyzemba.com

Scott Illingworth (Director) is a freelance director, Associate Chair of the Graduate Acting Program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, author of "Exercises for Embodied Actors: Tools for Physical Actioning," and the director/producer of The Verbatim Salon. He served as Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University and is a Fulbright Grant recipient. Focused on new and adapted work, his directing credits include collaborations with Lucas Hnath, Christina Anderson, and Mona Mansour (with whom he co-founded SOCIETY Theatre Collective). His work has been seen in New York, across the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia. Recent projects also include "The Clear Blue Skies: Diaries from Ukraine," an in-ear verbatim ensemble performance built entirely from audio diaries and interviews with young Ukrainians in the first months of the war. www.scottillingworth.com

SOCIETY is a collective of theatre makers based in NYC creating research-driven, radically collaborative new works. Our method invests in a playwright-driven development process modeled after the Joint Stock Company that was active in the UK during the 1970s. First founded in 2019, with our first producing year in 2022, SOCIETY made a splash into the indie downtown theater scene with two world premieres in Rep. www.societytheatre.com Instagram/FB: @societytheatreco

Since 1993, HERE Arts Center has been one of New York's most prolific arts organizations. Today, it stands at the forefront of the city's cultural scene, producing and presenting daring, new, multidisciplinary performance experiences. From our home in Lower Manhattan, HERE builds an inclusive community that nurtures artists of all backgrounds as they disrupt conventional expectations to create innovative performances in theatre, dance, music, puppetry, media, and visual art. By providing these genre-blending artists with an adaptive, flexible home for developing and producing their work, we share a range of perspectives reflective of the complexity of our city. HERE welcomes curious audiences to witness groundbreaking performances, responsive to the world in which we live, at free and affordable prices.