Perabo, Northlich & McLeod Set for SEVEN CARD DRAW at Dixon Place, 3/16-3/18

On Tuesday, March 16, Dixon Place proudly presents a night of dark comic tales of risk and reward in Seven Card Draw. A sequel to the 2007 hit show Five Story Walkup, Seven Card Draw includes brand new works by prolific and controversial writer/director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty, The Shape of Things and Reasons to be Pretty) and legendary playwright John Guare (House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation). Other contributing authors are gothic monologist Clay McLeod Chapman, playwrights Quincy Long, Laura Shaine, Daniel F. Levin and the show's producer/director, Daniel Gallant. The night will also include performances by film and television actress Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly, The Prestige, House, Law and Order: Criminal Intent), five-time winner of the Manhattan Monologue Slam Katie Northlich and Clay McLeod Chapman, who will be performing his own monologue. Seven Card Draw will run for only three performances at Dixon Place.

Seven Card Draw reunites the seven authors who contributed new plays and monologues to the original Five Story Walk Up, a benefit production that raised over twenty thousand dollars for the 13th Street Repertory Theater in 2007. The seven short works that premiered during the run of Five Story Walk Up were subsequently published in Applause Books' anthology BEST AMERICAN SHORT PLAYS OF 2007-2008.

ABOUT THE WORK
Seven Card Draw showcases never-before-staged plays and monologues by all seven authors. John Guare's monologue "What It Was Like" describes life in 1970s Manhattan, when the author was living in John Lennon's former apartment and watching the city fall apart while building his own theatrical career. The prolific Quincy Long (whose plays have been staged at venues including the Mark Taper Forum, the Atlantic Theater Company, E.S.T. and South Coast Rep) will debut his short play "The Huntsmen", in which a lawyer discovers that his son may have committed a violent crime and must decide whether to protect or prosecute. Laura Shaine (author of popular plays and memoirs including Sleeping Arrangements and Beautiful Bodies) contributes "Beware of Waiter," a dark screwball comedy in which a young urbanite couple visits an eccentric restaurant and meets a waiter who is secretly obsessed with an endangered species.

Celebrated monologist Clay McLeod Chapman (creator of "The Pumpkin Pie Show" and author of the books rest area and miss corpus) will perform a chilling new work. Daniel F. Levin (author of the New York Times-lauded holiday show Hee-Haw: It's a Wonderful Lie and the musical To Paint the Earth) conjures a haunted historical re-enactment in "What Really Happened, starring Abraham Lincoln." In Daniel Gallant's "Determined to Prove," a sheepish young man uses a Shakespeare monologue to pull off an elaborate con. And Neil LaBute rounds out the evening with "Totally", in which a young woman exacts an unusual revenge against her philandering mate.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Daniel Gallant is the Executive Director of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a legendary multi-arts performance venue in Manhattan's East Village. He previously served as the Director of Theater and Talk Programming at the 92nd Street Y's Makor and Tribeca Centers. Daniel produced and directed the original Five Story Walkup, a benefit production of new plays and monologues that raised more than $20,000 to save the Thirteenth Street Repertory Theatre from demolition. He has produced plays and musicals off-Broadway, including the premiere of David Brandes' and Joseph Telushkin's play The Quarrel (based on their award-winning film), and curated thousands of theatrical events for multiple arts organizations, featuring rising artists as well as Tony, Oscar and Pulitzer winners and nominees (among them, Tony Kushner, Chazz Palminteri, Edward Albee, Norman Mailer, David Strathairn and Warren Leight). In summer 2008, Gallant's play Gerald's Method was produced twice in New York (at Center Stage and in the Midtown InterNational Theatre Festival) and nominated by the New York Innovative Theatre Awards for best short script. Gallant's other short works have been staged at venues including Theater for the New City, the Cornelia Street Cafe, Galapagos and Mo Pitkins, and his plays have been published in anthologies by Random House and Applause/Hal Leonard. For further details, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gallant or email gallant.arts@gmail.com.

John Guare (writer, Blue Monologue) received the Obie, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Tony nominations for House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, which also won the Olivier Award for Best Play. He won a Tony for his libretto to Two Gentlemen of Verona, which also won the Tony as Best Musical of 1972. He received Tony and Drama Desk nominations for his book of the musical Sweet Smell of Success, and his screenplay for Louis Malle's Atlantic City earned him an Oscar nomination. Signature Theatre devoted its 1998-99 season to his work. Mr. Guare is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theatre Hall of Fame, is currently a vice president of PEN/America, co-edits the Lincoln Center Theater Review and is a council member of the Dramatists Guild.

Neil LaBute: Films include: In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, and The Shape of Things, a film adaptation of his play by the same title. His latest film Wicker Man, starring Nicolas Cage, was released in September 2006. Plays include: bash: latter-day plays; The Shape of Things; The Distance From Here; and The Mercy Seat. Awards include New York Critics' Circle Award for Best First Feature and Filmmakers' Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, both for In the Company of Men. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, and Playboy among others.

Daniel Frederick Levin is a playwright, composer and lyricist living in Brooklyn. His play, HEE-HAW: It's a Wonderful Li e, recently finished a run at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Dec. 2009) and was called a "delightful surprise" by the New York Times. Daniel's musical, To Paint the Earth, written with composer Jonathan Portera, won the 2004 Richard Rogers Development Award (Stephen Sondheim, committee chair) and was selected for the 2008 New York Musical Theatre Festival (37 Arts). The two also served as fellows at the Dramatists Guild. Daniel's plays and musicals, including The Waiter...always the waiter and Going to Belize, have been performed at La Mama, the 92nd Street Y's Makor/Steinhardt Center, SUNY Cortland and the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, among other venues. In 2002, Daniel premiered his short musical, "The Hungry Lion," also written with Jonathan Portera, at the old Dixon Place, and is delighted to be returning to premiere at the new one.

Clay McLeod Chapman is the creator of the rigorous storytelling session The Pumpkin Pie Show. He is the author of rest area, a collection of short stories, and miss corpus, a novel. He teaches writing at The Actors Studio MFA Program at Pace University.

Quincy Long's (writer, Aux Cops) plays have been seen locally at Playwrights Horizons, the Atlantic Theater, and Soho Rep, and regionally at The Mark Taper Forum, The Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Berkelely Rep. Current projects: Loulou, a musical commissioned by Ginger Cat Productions in Toronto and Buried Alive, an opera commissioned by American Lyric Theater in New York. Mr. Long is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and a member of New Dramatists, Ensemble Studio Theater, the Writers Guild, Actors Equity, Screen Actors Guild, the HB Playwrights Unit and BMI's Librettists Workshop. He is from Warren, Ohio, lives in New York City and is represented by the Bret Adams Agency.

Laura Shaine is the author of eight books and a journalist whose work has been published in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her plays are popular throughout Europe and she has won many awards including two National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships.

ABOUT DIXON PLACE
Dixon Place is a non-profit organization founded in 1986 to provide a space for literary and performing artists to create and develop new works in front of a live audience. While other venues of its kind have since died off, or now only present established artists, Dixon Place remains at the heart of the New York experimental performance scene. Taking risks is crucial to the life of Dixon Place, its artists and audiences.

For these artists, the only way to experiment and test ideas, is to perform them before an audience: to feel the reaction of a live group of people, without the pressures of production costs and premature press exposure. Dixon Place has grown out of a direct need for more support of the artistic process. In spite of the growing visibility of performance art, it is still difficult for emerging artists to find venues in which to test new ideas and performance techniques. The financial and professional risks for producers or presenters are too high. Dixon Place, therefore, provides an organization that facilitates these artistic experiments.

TICKET INFORMATION:
Tickets are $15 full price and $12 for students and senior citizens. To purchase tickets visit https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/7810755.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
Tuesday, March 16 at 8:00PM
Wednesday, March 17 at 8:00PM
Thursday, March 18 at 8:00PM

 

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