'Ice Factory' Summer Festival Announces Line-Up

Artistic Director Robert Lyons proudly presents the 15th annual ICE FACTORY summer festival of new work. ICE FACTORY '08 opens July 9th, presenting seven New York premieres in seven weeks, and wraps up August 23rd. All performances are at the Ohio
Theatre – 66 Wooster Street (b/t Spring & Broome) in Soho. Performances are Wednesdays–Saturdays at 7pm. Previous ICE FACTORY shows have gone on to Off-Broadway, the Joyce, PS 122, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, Walker Art Center, et al. Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for students/seniors via SmartTix at 212-868-4444 or http://www.SmartTix.com. Trains: R, W to Prince St. or 6, C, E to Spring St. For more information visit http://www.SohoThinkTank.org.

In the ICE FACTORY festival, Soho Think Tank presents work by emerging and established downtown companies, as well as exceptional national and international groups. Ice Factory prides itself on maintaining an extraordinary aesthetic diversity along with an unequaled standard for intelligent, imaginative theater. The festival offers companies—like the Foundry, Elevator Repair Service, Les Frères Corbusier, Jane Comfort, New Georges, Pig Iron, the Rude Mechanicals and Big Time Action Theatre—a prime forum in which to develop their work.

SOHO THINK TANK strengthens, nurtures and promotes an aesthetically and culturally diverse community of independent theatre artists and theatre companies by producing, presenting, and programming new work at the Ohio Theatre, in Soho.

July 9 -12
Do Not Do This Ever Again
Written by Karinne Keithley and directed by Maria Goyanes

In a landscape of lost love and modern loneliness a company of strangers map a tentative journey towards just letting go. A guided tour of the memory palace. A theatrical/music composition, from simple counterpoint voices to freestanding opera. Indoor environmental theatre in four movements.

Developed in the 2006-2007 SoHo Rep Writer/Director Lab through a two-year collaboration between prolific dance, video, sound, and
performance artist Karinne Keithley and director Maria Goyanes (Artistic Associate, The Public Theatre).

July 16 - 19
TRACES/fades
Written and directed by Lenora Champagne
Music by Daniel Levi. Video by Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons. Production
design by Liz Prince.

Lost traditions. Memory gaps. Lessons forgotten. Action and images shift in the mind of a woman with Alzheimer's, flickering from past to present, from her daughter's home to the nursing home. Who are we when we can't remember? An intergenerational meditation on the fluid nature of identity and our national inability to remember history. With original music and video.

Lenora Champagne, a New Yorker by way of her native Louisiana, is a playwright, director and performer. She is a three-time NEA Fellow, a two-time NYFA Fellow, and a multiple MacDowell and Yaddo Fellow. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and has received a Richard Rodgers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. TRACES/fades was commissioned by NYSCA and developed at HERE Arts Center. This production has support from LMCC, the Puffin Foundation and Purchase College.

July 23 - 26
Neil Young's Greendale (a rock opera)
Written by Neil Young
Presented by Undermain Theatre (TX)
Adapted for the stage by the ensemble and directed by Katherine Owen

This song cycle, by legendary singer-songwriter Neil Young, has been compared to Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Sherwood Anderson's Winesberg Ohio as a portrait of the changing face of small town America. Performed with a live band and sung by an ensemble cast, Neil Young's Greendale explores the lives of three generations of the Green family through themes ranging from corruption to mass media consolidation to environmentalism. Voted one of the best albums of 2003 by Rolling Stone Magazine.

Undermain Theatre is an ensemble of artists that performs new and experimental works in Texas, New York, and Europe. They collaborate with playwrights; support a theater archive; publish plays; and sustain a theater under Main Street in Dallas' legendary Deep Ellum. "One of the best small theaters in America" – The San Diego Union-Tribune.

July 30 – August 2
Heistman
Presented by El Gato Teatro
Written by Obie-Winner Matthew Maher and directed by Gabriella Barnstone
Featuring the inimitable Steven Rattazzi

Heistman is stuck—inside the bank he is robbing with his henchmen, inside his own tortured head and inside the feeling he can never have success or love. The cops have the joint surrounded and have no answers. But the hostages do. Dog Day Afternoon meets The Unabomber Manifesto. Dance/theater for visionaries, the weak at heart and the pleasure-seekers alike.

Dances about neurotic people, or neurotic dances? El Gato Teatro brings "everyman dance" to the world; fusing dance, theater, text, music and sheer entertainment. Their work has been presented at The Chocolate Factory, Williamsburg Art Nexus, Dixon Place, Collective Unconscious, The Kitchen and the NYC subway.

August 6 - 9
red-haired Thomas
Written and directed by Robert Lyons

His daughter doesn't need him. His wife might leave him. His newspaper vender might just kill him. Nightmare mythology of a paranoid urban father as he navigates the back-alleys of fate, destiny and plain old bad luck. Will Thomas Jefferson save the day?

Robert Lyons is the Artistic Director of Soho Think Tank. He has written, directed, developed, produced, and presented innumerable
projects over the last fifteen years, at the Ohio Theatre and beyond. His last play was Doorman's Double Duty. "A sweet one-act...a gem." – The New York Times

August 13 - 16
W.M.D. (just the low points)
Presented by Sponsored by Nobody
Created by the ensemble and directed by Kevin Doyle

A large-scale deconstruction of our culture's preoccupations. Incorporates elements of theatre, dance, film, music and installation
art. Structured around the events of a single date (January 8, 2004), using found texts as a base to examine Americans' relationship with
their media during wartime. A titanic attempt to rediscover the nation's soul.

SBN is the acclaimed Brooklyn-based theatre company committed to developing new work that is immediately relevant to contemporary America. Founded in 2005, SBN has established a reputation for presenting abrasive theatre that refuses to relinquish the idea of art as a catalyst for social change. W.M.D. will have its European Premiere in March 2009 at The Game Is Up! Festival at the Vooruit Art Center in Ghent, Belgium -- followed by performances at the Monty Art Center in Antwerp and the Beursschouwburg Art Center in Brussels.

August 20 - 23
Victory at the Dirt Place
Presented by Riot Group
Written & directed by Adriano Shaplin

Rival father/daughter news anchors compete for ratings in a head-to-head prime-time showdown. Their vicious battle for supremacy becomes a national drama as sex scandals, terrorism and dementia threaten their careers. A wicked satire about heredity and corruption among media royalty. Faithlessly adapted from King Lear this New York debut is fresh off of heralded stops in Edinburgh and London.
"Slick…Ferocious…Mesmeric" – The Independent. "Twisted…Crude…Riveting" – Evening Standard. "Smartly funny…terrific" – The Guardian.

Riot Group have performed Off-Broadway, off-West End and at numerous international venues including Riverside Studios, Walker Arts Center and Theatre Der Welt. The company are veterans of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where they previously received four Scotsman Fringe First Awards.

Need more Off-Off-Broadway Theatre News in your life?
Sign up for all the news on the Spring season, discounts & more...