Fresh Fruit Festival to Present MEET YOU DOWNSTAIRS as Opening Event in April

The 2023 Fresh Fruit Festival will present the featured opening event: a premiere -- Katy Copeland's coming out and coming of age dramedy, Meet You Downstairs. LIMITED RUN: April 24 @ 8:00 p.m.; April 26 @ 8:30 p.m.; and April 30 @ 1:00 p.m.; for the 13th year in a row, the festival will take place at The Wild Project, 195 E 3rd St, NYC.

Meet You Downstairs tells the story - in four scenes - of young, queer Kit, ferociously trying to come up with any label appropriately defining her sexuality, goes on a wild ride navigating three very different very crucial relationships over a decade. Kit stumbles through her 20s attempting to unpack the integral complexities of love, sex, relationships, infidelity, gender and what it means to be queer in a heteronormative world.

"It's all real and none of it's real," says multi-hyphenate artist Copeland, "I wrote about my experience as a queer woman navigating relationships throughout my 20s. I wrote about those pivotal moments in life; the ones that rock your core. I wrote down things that scare me. I wrote down painfully harsh truths about myself and about the world. I wrote about love, friendship and sexual identity. I wrote what I know and then I simply made stuff up. I started writing as a therapeutic exercise. Inspired by badasses like Mae Martin, Michaela Coel, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Issa Rae and Greta Gerwig to name a few, I was like, 'I'm gonna do that.' I was getting frustrated with audition material and wanted to write the people that I wanted to play. I continued writing because I found catharsis. I started to fall in love with the characters; an amalgamation of many people I've met and am honored to know. Although writing this play started out as a journey of self-healing, I sincerely believe it can go far beyond helping me. In sharing this story, "In sharing this story, I wanted to feel seen and hope others will feel seen through it."

First workshopped in 2021, Meet You Downstairs was presented as a staged reading in the Voices of Women Theatre Festival produced by Powerstories Theatre in collaboration with Thrü-Line Theatrical Production Company.

Katy Copeland is an actor, dancer, choreographer and emerging playwright living in New York City. Her work has appeared at New York venues including Theater for the New City, The Tank NYC and the Salvatore Capezio Theater. She most recently can be seen on FX's Fleishman Is In Trouble streaming on Hulu. Katy is a certified yoga, fitness and dance instructor and has set award-winning choreography for numerous dance studios. In a full circle moment Katy will head to her alma mater this spring as a guest in residency to choreograph Western Michigan University's Department of Dance BFA graduates final presentation piece. Meet You Downstairs is Katy's first play.

Established in 1991, All Out Arts is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to bringing together the diverse artistic, organizational, political and financial resources of the LGBTQ community in order to fight intolerance. All Out Arts fulfills its mission by supporting arts organizations within the community through fiscal sponsorship, events, contests, collaborations, networking events for emerging artists, and by sponsoring productions, concerts and exhibitions of visual arts. They confront homophobia through the humanizing influence of the arts, and Fresh Fruit Festival is the primary expression of All Out Arts' mission. The Fresh Fruit Festival was the creation of two long established LGBT community arts groups: New Village Productions: and All Out Arts. Now the festival is presented by All Out Arts to celebrate the LGBTQ community's unique perspective, creativity & diversity - local, national, and international - and as of two years ago - on stage, on film, and on the air.