Waterwell to Begin 20th Anniversary Year With Lameece Issaq's A GOOD DAY TO ME NOT TO YOU At Connelly Theater

Waterwell will begin its 20th anniversary year with the world premiere of A Good Day to Me Not to You, a solo play written and performed by Drama Desk Award-winner Lameece Issaq (Food and Fadwa). Directed by Waterwell's Artistic Director and two-time Obie Award-winner Lee Sunday Evans (Oratorio for Living Things, Dance Nation), A Good Day to Me Not to You runs November 8 – December 9, 2023, at the Connelly Theater (220 E 4th St, Manhattan) with an opening set for Wednesday, November 15. Waterwell's production of A Good Day to Me Not to You is presented through special arrangement with Plate Spinner Productions. Tickets are currently on sale at www.waterwell.org.

Writer and actor Lameece Issaq teams up with director Lee Sunday Evans on her riotously funny and gut-wrenching new play that wrestles with questions of purpose, fulfillment, and motherhood. It centers on a 40-whatever dental lab tech who gets fired, loses her apartment, and moves into St. Agnes Residence, a woman's rooming house run by nuns. While there, she must come to terms with her unfulfilled path to motherhood and high-stakes questions about her fertility as well as the untimely death of her sister – all while fending off her unpredictable and sometimes deranged cohabitants. The play is performed by Issaq in a story-telling tour-de-force.

 

“I've spent my career writing about being Middle Eastern. With this show, I want to talk about being Middle Aged,” says playwright and performer Lameece Issaq. “What happens when you spend your years focused on your career and building your community, but not your family? What choices are people left with when their resources are limited?”

“Lameece's play takes us to the heart of some big, often 'off-limits' questions about women's experiences through a very personal, specific, funny story,” says director Lee Sunday Evans. “Theater is a space with the potential for transcendence where we gather to examine life, humanity, and to live through the cycles of generations changing. A Good Day to Me Not to You centers a woman's story at a moment when she is on a great-and-totally-regular precipice. Living with her while she figures out a host of unexpected and monumental life changes gives us room to examine our own potential for change. That is the gift of theater, and absolutely the gift of Lameece's new play.”

 

“Lameece is one of our great artists, and we're thrilled to be producing her first solo play,” says Arian Moayed, Waterwell's co-founder and Board Chair. “For 20 years, Waterwell has served as a community galvanizer, helping to tackle some of our biggest civic questions through engrossing entertainment. In a time and place when women's rights in the United States are constantly being removed, I believe A Good Day to Me Not to You can help us better understand why we need to continue fighting for equity and equality for all people.”

The creative team for A Good Day to Me Not to You includes Peiyi Wong (set design), Jian Jung (costume design), Mextly Couzin (lighting design), Avi Amon (original composition and sound design), Siena Yusi (production stage manager), Oscar Escobedo (associate set design), and Victor Cervantes Jr., Arian Moayed, and Rachel Sussman (executive producers).

Performances of A Good Day to Me Not to You will take place November 8 – December 9, 2023, at the Connelly Theater, located at 220 E 4th St in Manhattan. Critics are welcome as of Friday, November 10 for an opening on Wednesday, November 15. The performance schedule is Mondays–Saturdays at 7pm with additional 2pm matinees on November 18 & 25 and no performances November 22–24. The running time is 90 minutes with no intermission.

Tickets are general admission and priced according to a sliding scale ticketing initiative, $15–$95, reflecting Waterwell's commitment to accessibility and belief that theater should not be a luxury or a privilege. Tickets can be purchased at www.waterwell.org. Standard ticketing fees apply.

Please visit www.waterwell.org for more information.
 

About the Artists
 

Lameece Issaq (writer & performer) is an actor, writer, and co-founder/former artistic director of the Obie Award-winning company Noor Theatre. Lameece has appeared in several regional and Off-Broadway productions, including The Fever Chart and Stuff Happens (Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Ensemble) at The Public Theatre, The Black Eyed at New York Theatre Workshop and Noura at The Old Globe, among several others. She's written various short plays for the The New York Arab-American Comedy Festival; as well Noor & Hadi Go to Hogwarts (Theater Breaking Through Barriers, Golden Thread Theater); Orb Weaver (24/6) and Nooha's List, part of the compilation play, Motherhood Outloud (Hartford Stage, The Geffen and Primary Stages). Her full length play Food and Fadwa (2011 recipient of the Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award) premiered Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop in a production she co-produced and starred in, and in which Variety magazine praised her performance as “stunning.” Food and Fadwa was a part of the Arab Voices Festival in both Abu Dhabi and Beirut and was published in the anthology “Contemporary Plays By Women of Color,” second edition. She co-wrote the feature film Abe, directed by Fernando Grostein Andrade, and starring Stranger Things' Noah Schnapp, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Her most recent play, A Good Day to Me Not to You, has been developed at Williamstown Theatre Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, The Cape Cod Theatre Project, Noor Theatre, and Theatre Aspen's Solo Flights Festival. Lameece is a member of AEA and SAG AFTRA. 2016 NYFA Finalist in Playwriting/Screenwriting. www.lameeceissaq.com

Lee Sunday Evans (director) is a two-time Obie Award-winning director + choreographer and the Artistic Director of Waterwell. She most recently directed the acclaimed production of Heather Christian's Oratorio for Living Things and was announced as the director of a Broadway-bound musical adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. She is developing a TV project for A24. Notable credits include Dance Nation by Clare Barron, The Courtroom by Arian Moayed as well as the feature-length film that premiered at Tribeca, Detroit Red by Will Power, Sunday by Jack Thorne, In The Green by Grace McLean, Miller, Mississippi by Boo Killebrew, and HOME by Geoff Sobelle.
 

About Waterwell

Waterwell (Lee Sunday Evans, Artistic Director; Sarah Scafidi, Managing Director; Heather Lanza, Director of Education; Arian Moayed, co-founder and Board Chair) is a group of artists, educators and producers dedicated to telling engrossing stories in unexpected ways that deliberately wrestle with complex civic questions. The company is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this season with this premiere production, a big party, and a story series: 20 stories for 20 years. Waterwell's most recent production was the English-language premiere of 7 Minutes by Tony-Award winning writer Stefano Massini, directed by Mei Ann Teo. In 2019, Waterwell premiered The Courtroom, a verbatim re-enactment of one woman's deportation proceedings. Called “theater as civic meditation” and named “Best Theater of 2019” by The New York Times, it was performed in active legal spaces, including the seat of the Second Circuit at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse and then adapted into a feature-length film (www.thecourtroomfilm.com). In May 2019, Waterwell launched Fleet Week Follies, an annual festival for military service members and their families. During the pandemic, Waterwell produced screenings of videos from its project The Flores Exhibits (www.flores-exhibits.org) with 18 different partner organizations in 6 states around the country. Waterwell also produced a short documentary, Se Lo Que Es Pandemia / I Know What Pandemic Means in collaboration with Documented, a non-profit journalism outlet that focuses solely on immigration in New York and New Jersey (pandemia.nyc/)

 

Waterwell's education program trains young artists and educators to create work with an artist-as-citizen ethos as the foundation of their creative process. Waterwell's central program, the Waterwell Drama Program (WDP), teaches 200+ public school students each year at the Professional Performing Arts School, delivering daily in-class, conservatory-style instruction and rigorous after-school performance projects. This training culminates in the New Works Lab, a commission of a professional playwright to write an original play for the WDP senior class. Waterwell makes this world-class theater education available to a racially diverse student body from a wide range of economic backgrounds through our partnership of 10+ years with NYC's Professional Performing Arts School, as well as other schools throughout Manhattan. www.waterwell.org 

 

About Plate Spinner Productions

Plate Spinner Productions (Enhancing Producer) is a production company working across entertainment media, led by Diana DiMenna with colleagues Rachel Sussman and Celia Kaleialoha Kenney. PSP identifies, nurtures, and produces dynamic stories that challenge artists and audiences to question the status quo. Bway: Here Lies Love, Sweeney Todd, What the Constitution Means to Me (Tony nom, Pulitzer Prize finalist), The Old Man & The Pool, Dana H/Is This a Room. Film: Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan (Inaugural Chita Rivera Award). Projects in development: Dave Malloy's Octet, A Wrinkle in Time, Inherit the Wind and Same Time, Next Year. www.platespinnerproductions.com
 

About the Connelly Theater

The Connelly Theater is a historic jewel box playhouse that now serves as a home for adventurous independent theater. Productions include: The Good John Proctor and Fall River Fishing (Bedlam), Kate Berlant and Bo Burnham's Kate, Sasha Velour's Nightgowns: The Musical, The Crucible (Bedlam), Will Arbery's Plano (Clubbed Thumb), Mandy Patinkin in Concert: Diaries 2018 (NYTW), The Bengson's The Lucky Ones (Ars Nova), Sinking Ship's A Hunger Artist (The Tank), Mac Wellman's The Offending Gesture (The Tank), Daniel Kitson's A Show for Christmas, Lyspinka! The Trilogy (TWEED), and many others. The building itself was once an orphanage, built in the 1860s. www.connellytheater.org
 

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