terraNOVA Presents 'Groundbreakers' Reading Series, 2/22 - 3/8

terraNOVA Collective will present three new plays from its 2009 Groundbreakers Playwrights Program February 22nd and March 1st & 8th at Performance Space 122 (150 First Avenue at 9th Street). All readings begin at 7pm. Admission is open to the public with a $5 suggested donation.

In previous years, terraNOVA Collective developed promising plays from rolling open submissions. This season, the company restructured the existing feedback format and began a formal playwrights group, assembling seven emerging playwrights in a group setting. Over five months, each playwright participated in the first of a three-tiered process, receiving feedback over three sessions on a specific play or project.

Lucy Gillespie, Snehal Desai and Susan Ferrara emerged from the first tier this season as remarkable new voices. Each playwright's script advances to the second tier for a public staged reading. From this second tier, terraNOVA Collective chooses its main stage productions, the third tier in its Groundbreakers Playwrights Program.

"These are stories we've never heard before told from unique theatrical point of views." terraNOVA Artistic Director Jennifer Conley Darling said. "Now we're offering these plays up for the next important part of development - audience feedback."

Over the past five years, Groundbreakers Playwrights Program has developed over 60 plays from which terraNOVA Collecive cultivates its main stage productions, including past successes as the New York Innovative Theatre Award winning Blue Before Morning by Kate McGovern and Creating Illusion by Jeff Grow and spoken word artist Roger Bonair Agard's Masquerade: Calypso and Home.

Monday, February 22, 7pm
THE ATWATER PROJECT
By Lucy Gillespie
Directed by Megan Carter
A red neck, blues-playing sonofabitch spearheads a national campaign to elect George H. W. Bush to the Presidency. Bulldozing careers and smearing good names, Lee Atwater's way with the ladies and the media put him on top of American politics, until the day he discovered an inoperable brain tumor. Through song, soul and sass, Atwater comes face to face with his greatest fear - himself.

Monday, March 1, 7pm
SITA/SATI Apu A-sleep
a dream and some play
By Snehal Desai
Directed by Tea Alagic
A sleeping Apu dreams. He dreams of his death by a slurpee machine. He dreams of his the Pilgrims and the Indians. He dreams of his wife Sita Desi. He dreams about brown-ness. Apu sleeps and dreams...And as he dreams a wild and raucous company comes to life threatening to turn his dreams into a nightmare and force him and his wife to make the heartbreaking choice between assimilation and preservation.

Monday, March 8, 7pm
SUICIDE ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE
By Susan Ferrara
Directed by Jessi D. Hill
Timely and terrifying, this tale is one woman's fight to get her head above water after the death of her husband, which left her drowning in debt. Faced with supporting two young sons on her own, Fran reaches out to her sister and brother-in-law for help, but this well-meaning duo doesn't know the first thing about how to fill the void. Desperate and out of options, Fran begins receiving phone calls from a mysterious man offering help. But, the voice on the other end of the line has a grander agenda, and Fran is only a small part of a dark movement to change government policy.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts and through the Dramatist Guild Fund.

SNEHAI DESAI toured his first solo show, Finding Ways to Prove You're Not an Al-Qaeda Terrorist When You're Brown (and other stories of the gIndian), to sold out audiences across the United States from Philadelphia to San Francisco and recently had his third run in New York City at the HERE Arts Center. He recently presented his new play, Sita/Sati Part I: Apu A-Sleep with Desipina Theater Company in New York. A graduate of the MFA Directing Program at the Yale School of Drama and the founder of The Yale Southasian Theater Collective, Snehal's Directorial works include: Bertolt Brecht's Baal, an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, the world premiere of FOB: Fresh off the Boeing, Booty Fire, Cabaret, and Jose Rivera's Marisol. He has worked at theaters across the United States including: Yale Rep, Theater Emory, the Alliance Theater, Theater Rhinoceros, and Dad's Garage and is a member of the Lincoln Center Director's

Susan Ferrara is an actor and playwright whose plays include The Machine (a 2009 O'Neill semi-finalist and part of the Berwyn Trilogies which also includes Suicide on Pennsylvania Avenue and DNR). She has written and performed her own solo show Peasant at The Zipper Theatre, Theatre Row and chashama all in Manhattan, Darger (co-created with Jeremy Williams), Buzz (inspired by the search for famed director MaryAnn "Buzz" Goodbody), Beat ‘n Dobin (co-created with Teresa Harrison), and Hit Mom. Susan participated in the Flea Theatre's pataphysics workshop with Mac Wellman. As an actor, Susan was most recently on The Onion News Network and has performed at The Public Theatre in Suzan-Lori Park's 365 Plays. Other theatre includes The Cherry Orchard (Beckett Theatre), The Commission (Connelly Theatre), Candles to the Sun (Actors Theatre of Louisville), Charles L. Mee's Mail Order Bride, Henry VI, Parts I, II and III, Lie of the Mind and Orlando (with and adapted by Sarah Ruhl) and Clubbed Thumb Theatre's festival SummerWorks, among many. Susan studied acting in London, Chicago and New York and is a member of Actors Equity, the Screen Actors Guild, the Dramatists Guild and Resonance Ensemble.

LUCY GILLESPIE is an Anglo-American writer and performer who is mostly interested in bad people, and the people who suffer them. Writing and collaborating credits include Driving Lesson (Strawberry One-Act Festival), Keeping the Light: Stories of Lighthouse Keepers (Mystic Seaport, CT), Shadow Dracula (Northwestern), and Adrift (Theatermakers Ensemble, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center). As an actor, Lucy has performed with Full Stop Collective in NYC, Remy Bumppo Theater Company and the Oak Park Festival Theater in Chicago, the Mystic Seaport, and at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's Summer Playwright's Conference. She is also the author of The Pith and the Peel, a novella about a woman who kills and eats her husband. Her first full-length play, Hangman School for Girls, will premiere this Fall in New York City, produced by Vagabond Theater Ensemble and Full Stop Collective. Lucy holds a BA from Northwestern University in Theater and Fiction Writing.

TERRANOVA COLLECTIVE is a vibrant playground for artists devoted to innovative new and original theatrical works. Its multi-layered development process, solo arts festivals, and productions serve to nurture and liberate New York City.