TNC Presents Scratch Night, Offers Works In Progress To Audiences Starting 5/4

Crystal Field and Theater for the New City (TNC) will present a varied schedule "Scratch Night" performance program, which offers the opportunity for artists to present work in progress to an audience for one night. Scratch Night started in the United Kingdom in 2000 as a way to show work in progress in an evolution of performances. At TNC, we will put our own spin on the idea to best serve our own theatre community and New York area audiences.

Scratch Night is looking for a variety of the most daring artists to try out their most cool thoughts on stage and the audience will help in the development by way of TNC's scratch ballot. Scratch Nights will take place throughout the year on a varied schedule. All theatrical forms are welcome. All stages of development are welcome.

Scratch Night at TNC will premiere on Monday, May 4th at 7pm
Contribution: $5

The Iron Heel
A Music-Theater Adaptation of the Jack London Novel
Written and Directed by Elizabeth Ruf-Maldonado, Ph.D.

This work-in-progress performance is an original music-theater adaptation of Jack London's 1906 novel The Iron Heel. London set the novel in his own near future (1912-1932), conceiving the work as the journal of a woman revolutionary, Avis Everhard, who is organizing opposition to the mercenary army of the oligarchy, The Iron Heel.
Jack London's The Iron Heel foretells with striking accuracy the institutionalized anti-labor and racist violence as well as the systematic attacks on political opposition in the United States in the century after the novel's publication. It warns against complaisance, arguing that the economically powerful will stop at nothing in the attempt to protect their own material interests.

The music-theater adaptation of London's novel is intended to dialogue with and to delight the performative imaginations of audience members in order to spur awareness that societal change cannot be achieved simply by voting but must be forged collectively through an active pursuit of progressive vision.

ELIZABETH RUF-MALDONADO has performed, directed, taught, and written in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is the recipient of a Latino Arts Advancement Project Grant for Don Giovanni Rumbero: Love in Seville, a Spanglish adaptation of Mozart and da Ponte's Don Giovanni performed at the Nuyorican Poets Café and TNC's Lower East Side Festival of the Arts, which she wrote, directed, and conceived for Afro-Cuban instrumentation.

She has performed many leading roles at Theater for the New City, which will present The Iron Heel on September 24 - October 11, 2009, notably in socially and politically engaged historical musical theater pieces authored by Laurel Hessing, composed by Arthur Abrams, and directed by Crystal Field. These plays and roles include: Sketching Utopia, Undena, the early twentieth-century matriarch of the single-tax community still in existence at Free Acres, New Jersey; The Golden Bear (based on Jews Without Money, Mike Gold's memoir of life on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s), Lena, a Hungarian immigrant machine operator and union activist; and The Further Adventures of Uncle Wiggily: Windblown Visitors (which places the animal protagonists of Howard Garis's Uncle Wiggily in flood-ravaged New Orleans and a gentrifying New York City), Lola the 5th Avenue hawk. She also performed a leading role in the world premiere of Dream Star Café, by Puerto Rican Playwright Jack Agüeros at TNC.
She has consistently meshed her scholarly and cultural work with activism. In 2000 she traveled with 100 community activists from the Lower East Side to Vieques, Puerto Rico, where she advocated for withdrawal of the U.S. Marines from the island by directing and presenting a collective theater piece that incorporated U.S. and Puerto-Rican activists, as well as children, elders, and musicians from the Vieques community. She was a member of the first International Work Brigades to Nicaragua and a co-founder of a Lower East Side CISPES group in the early 1980s. She is a member of U.S./Cuba Labor Exchange and a doctoral graduate of Columbia University with a thesis on the performance of blackness in contemporary theater in Cuba. Her published writings include a 1986 interview with then Nicaraguan National Theater Director, Alan Bolt, as well as a piece on performances of gender, color, and nationalism at Cuba's Tropicana Nightclub. Her teaching college students and immigrant adults at Henry Street Settlement in New York, Casa Aztlan and Daley College in Chicago, Rancho Santiago Community College in Southern California, Columbia University, Hunter College, and Boricua College has always incorporated movement-based theater improvisations and short plays developed by students around their own experiences. Most recently she directed a group of Boricua College students in a dance-theater setting of an original "Urban Book" scripted by a Boricua College student at the Theaters at 45 Bleecker Street.

Please rsvp to: literary@theaterforthenewcity.net

For submission information: http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/submissions.htm and materials should be sent attn: Michael Scott-Price, Literary Manager of Theater for the New City.

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