Trio of Off-Broadway Companies to Present THE EVERY 28 HOURS PLAYS

The New Group, LAByrinth Theater Company and Working Theater present selections from The Every 28 Hours Plays, a collection of one-minute plays centered on the current Civil Rights and BlackLivesMatter movements.

Set for Monday, November 7, this one-night-only event includes staged readings at 6:00pm and 8:30pm, each followed by a discussion of the issues raised by the plays, and how art/activism can impact the local and national conversation around BlackLivesMatter. This New York presentation of The Every 28 Hours Plays takes place at The Bank Street Theater (155 Bank Street). This event is FREE and Open to the public; RSVP required to literary@thenewgroup.org. Seating is limited.

On August 19, 2014 the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown set Ferguson, Missouri ablaze and sounded a national rallying call to end police brutality and protect the lives of Black men, women and children. Motivated by the burgeoning BlackLivesMatter movement, a group of artists and community organizers gathered in St. Louis that same month to craft a national artistic response to the oppression, violence and resistance happening in Ferguson. That effort - spanning three days over which the participants witnessed, served and collaborated in artistic exchange - resulted in The Every 28 Hours Plays.

Originally co-organized by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and One Minute Play Festival, The Every 28 Hours Plays is a collection of 72 one-minute plays written by playwrights from all over the country in response to the events in Ferguson, MO, and the widely shared statistic that every 28 hours, a Black person is the victim of systemic violence somewhere in the United States.

As part of the ongoing national effort to engage audiences with these plays, on November 7, The New Group, LAByrinth Theater Company and Working Theater jointly present selections from The Every 28 Hours Plays, sharing approximately 50 plays from the collection, including one-minute works by Keith Josef Adkins, Zakkiyyah Alexander, Kristoffer Diaz, Colman Domingo, Amina Henry, Chisa Hutchinson, David Henry Hwang, Nambi E. Kelley, Dominique Morisseau, Lynn Nottage, Nikkole Salter, Robert Schenkkan and many others, delivered by a company of volunteer directors and actors.

The Every 28 Hours Plays was co-created and produced by Claudia Alick of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), Dominic D'Andrea of The One-Minute Play Festival (1MPF), with the participation of theater artists around the country. The first two phases of this project supported the creation and development of this body of plays into a sharable format. Originally created and produced on the ground in the St. Louis community, and in Ferguson, the current third phase of the project is a coordinated series of national readings and engagements all over the country sponsored and presented by partnering theaters. For more information on the original artists who created this body of work, visit every28hoursplays.org.

The New Group (Scott Elliott, Artistic Director; Adam Bernstein, Executive Director) is an award-winning, artist-driven company with a commitment to developing and producing powerful, contemporary theater. While constantly evolving, the company strives to maintain an ensemble approach to all its work and an articulated style of emotional immediacy in its productions. In this way, The New Group seeks a theater that is adventurous, stimulating and most importantly "now," a true forum for the present culture.

Notable productions include Buried Child, The Spoils, Rasheeda Speaking, Sticks and Bones, Annapurna, Ecstasy, This is Our Youth, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Hurlyburly, Abigail's Party, Rafta, Rafta..., The Starry Messenger, A Lie of the Mind, Blood From a Stone, Marie and Bruce, The Jacksonian, Intimacy and many more. The company has received nearly 100 awards and nominations for excellence. The New Group is a recipient of the 2004 Tony® Award for Best Musical (Avenue Q). In 2011, The Kid received five Drama Desk nominations and the Outer Critics Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical. That year, The New Group and Scott Elliott were honored with a Drama Desk Special Award "for presenting contemporary new voices, and for uncompromisingly raw and powerful productions."

LAByrinth Theater Company (Mimi O'Donnell, Artistic Director) was founded in 1992 by a small group of actors who wanted to push their artistic limits and tell new, more inclusive stories that expanded the boundaries of mainstream theater. In doing so, they created a tightly knit, uninhibited and impassioned ensemble that created incendiary and vital new works for the stage that redefined the landscape of New York City theater. Today, based at the Bank Street Theater in New York's West Village, Labyrinth is home for diverse theater artists and the daring and visceral work they create. Driven by a diverse group of over 120 actors, directors, playwrights and designers, Labyrinth produces new works for the stage, giving voice to new perspectives that are powerful, groundbreaking and that have changed the face of America's theatrical landscape. Labyrinth has premiered over 60 new American plays including Empanada Loca, Nice Girl, Sunset Baby, The Motherfucker with the Hat, Jack Goes Boating and Jesus Hopped the A Train.

Working Theater has commissioned, developed and produced over seventy culturally diverse world-premiere plays. The company's work has addressed subjects and themes ranging from the working conditions of television production crews (Rob Ackerman's Tabletop) to the unequal distribution of wealth in America (Marty Pottenger's Abundance) to the struggles of women working in upstate New York poultry plants (Lisa Ramirez's To the Bone) to the shared journey of undocumented immigrants crossing the United States border, staged inside an actual 18-wheeler (Ed Cardona, Jr.'s La Ruta). Working Theater is currently working on a multi-year project, Five Boroughs/One City, in which they have commissioned teams of theater makers to collaborate with community members in neighborhoods in each of the five boroughs of New York City to create an original play firmly rooted in the cultural identity of each neighborhood, expressing the hopes, challenges and celebrations of communities throughout NYC.

For more about the November 7 presentation of The Every 28 Hour Plays, visit thenewgroup.org/every28hours. To reserve for the 6:00pm or 8:30pm presentation on November 7, contact literary@thenewgroup.org.

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