spit&vigor Theatre Company Will Present Sara Fellini's ECTOPLASM at the Players Theatre

spit&vigor theatre company (2015 NYIT Award-winners for In Vestments) will present the World Premiere of Ectoplasm, written and directed by Sara Fellini (Hazard a Little Death, Best New Script at the 2014 Planet Connections Theater Festivity). The production will run January 5-February 6, 2022 at The Players Theatre (115 MacDougal Street New York, NY 10012) with performances on Thursday, Friday & Saturday at 7pm and Sundays at 2pm. Tickets ($52-$99) are available for advance purchase at www.spitnvigor.com. The performance will run approximately 90 minutes, with no intermission.

A private seance at an intimate dinner party in 1912 - among the guests is a famous magician, based on the real-life Harry Houdini, hell-bent on using his knowledge of illusions to de-bunk spiritualism. A simmering love triangle between the two spiritual mediums and a Byronesque madame adds gasoline to the tense private affair, and a mysterious uninvited guest leads the party to question life and death itself.

The cast will feature Alex Andrews (The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales with Atlantic Theatre), Adam Belvo (NYIT Outstanding Supporting Actor Nominee for The Brutes), Christina Calcote (ensemble member at The Seeing Place Theatre), Emily Eidman (Heathers with Rock River Rep), Morgan Zipf Meister (It's Getting Tired Mildred at The Brick; Greencard Wedding at HERE), Florence Scagliarini (2014 Planet Collections Outstanding Lead Actress Nominee for Hazard a Little Death), André Sguerra (After the Blast at Lincoln Center), Nicholas Thomas, and Ian Henry Walls (Taming of the Shrew with Vermont Shakespeare Festival) with understudies Jillian Cicalese (The Unnatural Combat with Sweet Tea Shakespeare) and Drew Reilly (And Away We Go with The Gallery Players).. The creative team will include Lighting Design by Chelsie McPhilimy (NYIT Award-nominee for Rush with Team Awesome Robot), Costume Design by Claire Daly (2018 Planet Connections Award Outstanding Costume Design Nominee), and Set & Props Design by Florence Flacassier (2015 NYIT Award winner).

Sara Fellini (Playwright/Director) is an award-winning playwright, director, actress, and skilled artisan. Her first play, Hazard a Little Death, was nominated for six awards at the 2014 Planet Connections Theater Festivity including Best Production of a New Play and Best Lead Actress (Sara Fellini), winning Best New Script. She performed in the monodrama The Other Mozart by Sylvia Milo at The Players Theatre in NYC and toured with the production (winning Cat5 magazine's Best Theater Production of 2015, "the voice of a crystal bell, Fellini is captivating" -NOLA Defender), and created the role of Maeve Shourd in a site-specific production of In Vestments, a play of her own writing and winner of two NYIT awards, nominated for Outstanding New Full-Length Script, earning her theater company the Donn Russell Grant, and acclaimed by the New York Times as "wrenching and visually eloquent". She has appeared in another play of her own writing, The Execution of Mrs. Cotton (called "darkly humorous" and "deliciously ghoulish" by the New York Times) as part of IRT Theater's 3B Residency. She played Mary Shelley in Mary's Little Monster by Thomas Kee at the mudlark public theatre in NOLA, The Davenport Theatre in NYC as part of the Davenport space grant, and at Torn Page, the historic home of Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. She played Artemisia Gentileschi in her play NEC SPE / NEC METU at The Tank's July 2017 DarkFest, at Theater Row as part of United Solo Festival, and by special invitation at The Glitter Box in Pittsburgh, PA. She played Asia Booth Clarke in The Brutes ("irresistibly dramatic, legitimately upsetting" - New York Times) by Casey Wimpee at The Flamboyan as part of The 10th Anniversary Planet Connections Festivity, nominated for 8 awards including Outstanding Direction and Outstanding Costume Design (both Sara Fellini). During quarantine, she wrote and directed Luna Eclipse, a one-shot livestream film, chosen as one of Time Out NY's Best Online Theater Productions, and she recently made her Off-Broadway debut in The Wake of Dorcas Kelly at The Players Theatre, a play she both wrote and directed, chosen as one of The Observer's Best Summer Theater of 2021.

Founded in 2015, spit&vigor theatre company is a non-profit theater company devoted to the development of new plays and spirited, innovative, phantasmagoric productions of existing work. Dedicated to makeshift, skin-of-your-teeth, ad hoc theater - bringing modern voices and perspectives to the wild, chaotic, irreverent, burlesque roots of theater. We have a special interest in gender issues, work and class issues, which we bring to all of our productions. We specialize in intimate theatrical productions in non-standard spaces.

spit&vigor's small roster of productions has been award winning and critically acclaimed, praised as "darkly humorous, deliciously ghoulish", "wrenching and visually eloquent", "irresistibly dramatic" and "legitimately upsetting" by the New York Times. In collaboration with Theatre4thePeople, spit&vigor was the recipient of the 2015 New York Innovative Theater Outstanding Premiere Production of a Play Award for In Vestments, their first production in a historic chapel at The West Park Presbyterian Church which included an Artist Support Grant from the Donn Russell Fund. spit&vigor has since gone on to earn The Players Theater Off-Broadway Artistic Residency, The Center at West Park's Artist Residency, IRT's 3B Residency, The Davenport space grant, and The Times Center space grant. They have also performed by special invitation at The Glitterbox Theater in Pittsburgh and the 2017 NOLA InFringe Festival. In 2019 they were invited by the descendants of a famous theatrical family, the Booths, for the first-ever full theater performance at The Players, the historic social club in NYC. www.spitnvigor.com