| RED BULL THEATER presents Gallathea & Galatea, 2 Benefit Readings: GALLATHEA by John Lyly March 15 and GALATEA by MJ Kaufman March 22 performed LIVE | |
| Last Edit: Official_Press_Release 02:22 pm EST 03/03/21 | |
| Posted by: Official_Press_Release 02:16 pm EST 03/03/21 | |
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| "A dynamic producer of classic plays" - Ben Brantley, The New York Times "The most exciting classical theater in New York" - Time Out NY RED BULL THEATER Presents Gallathea & Galatea Two Benefit Readings: GALLATHEA by John Lyly Directed by Emma Rosa Went Monday March 15th at 7:30 PM EDT Presented in collaboration with The Drama League GALATEA by MJ Kaufman Directed by Will Davis Monday March 22nd at 7:30 PM EDT Presented in collaboration with WP Theater Online Presentations - Performed LIVE Today, RED BULL THEATER (Jesse Berger, Founder and Artistic Director | Jim Bredeson, Managing Director) announced that it is partnering independently with the Drama League and WP Theater on two exciting events inspired by John Lyly's play, Gallathea, an Elizabethan play that was premiered in 1588 by the boy players of the Children of Paul's. In its original production the boys portrayed all the men and women, and Lyly capitalized on heightened comedic possibilities of this practice. Director Emma Rosa Went will offer her take on Lyly's original text; a week later playwright MJ Kaufman gives us the World Premiere of a new play inspired by Lyly's. "In a cosmic convergence of creativity, director Emma Rosa Went and playwright MJ Kaufman have both been passionately artistically engaged with John Lyly's foundational gender-exploring classic. All of us at Red Bull are thrilled to partner with the wonderful Drama League and the fabulous WP Theatre in sharing these two exciting American Women+ theater artists' responses to Lyly's classic comedy!" said artistic director Berger. GALLATHEA by John Lyly, Directed by Emma Rosa Went First performed in 1588, John Lyly's Gallathea is a comedy about metamorphosis and desire, a queer love story set inside the landscape of classical myth. In order to avoid becoming dinner for a sea monster, Gallathea and Phillida are sent into the forest dressed as boys. Meanwhile, three shipwrecked brothers set out to seek their fortunes, Cupid stirs up his usual trouble, nymphs fall for mortals, and Neptune God of the Sea waits to make his move. This playful pastoral of love, desire, and finding yourself is an affirmation of identity - joyfully reclaimed for 2021. Presented in collaboration with The Drama League, Gallathea by John Lyly and directed by Emma Rosa Went, will feature Olivia Rose Barresi (Courage! To the Field! at the Tank, Initiative at Playwright's Realm), Helen Cespedes (The School for Scandal - Red Bull Theater, Timon of Athens - Royal Shakespeare Company/Shakespeare Theatre Company/TFANA), Nathaniel P. Claridad (Disney's Mulan), Yonatan Gebeyehu, (Timon of Athens - TFANA) Amy Jo Jackson (The Great Recession - Flea Theater, Twelfth Night - Manhattan Shakespeare Project), Layla Khoshnoudi (Tumacho - Clubbed Thumb, Men on Boats - Playwrights Horizons), Rami Margron (Hurricane Diane - Old Globe, Pride and Prejudice - Long Wharf), Christopher Michael McFarland (Measure for Measure - TFANA, Cymbeline - Yale Rep), Jason O'Connell (Judgment Day at Park Avenue Armory, Happy Birthday Wanda June for Wheelhouse Theater), Aneesh Sheth (Netflix's "Jessica Jones," Southern Comfort - Public Theater, Twelfth Night - Public Theater's Mobile Shakespeare Unit), David Ryan Smith (Where We Stand - Baltimore Center Stage/WP Theater, Mankind - Playwrights Horizons), and Zo Tipp (Bundle of Sticks at INTAR). The online reading will premiere LIVE on Monday March 15th at 7:30 PM EDT. A recording of the livestream will be available until 7PM EDT on Friday, March 19th. This event is a benefit for Red Bull Theater. Tickets are Pay What You Can. Advance reservations are recommended. GALATEA by MJ Kaufman, Directed by Will Davis On Monday, March 22nd at 7:30 PM EDT, in collaboration with WP THEATER, Red Bull Theater will present the World Premiere of Galatea by MJ Kaufman (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, How to Live on Earth). Kaufman's Galatea is a trans love story set against the backdrop of a climate crisis. Loosely based on Lyly's play, MJ Kaufman's new play tells the story of two young women from a village threatened with flooding who escape to the nearby woods disguised as boys and fall in love. Directed by Will Davis (India Pale Ale, Men on Boats) and featuring Grammy Award-winner Ty Defoe, Jo Lampert (Hundred Days, Joan of Arc), Eve Lindley (AMC's "Dispatches from Elsewhere"), Aneesh Sheth (Netflix's "Jessica Jones," Southern Comfort - Public Theater), Futaba Shioda (Rent 20th Anniversary tour), and TL Thompson (Is This a Room). The event will premiere LIVE on Monday, March 22 at 7:30PM EDT. Rebroadcasts will be available until March 26 at 6PM EDT. Advance reservations are recommended. LIVE DISCUSSION Thursday March 25th at 7:30 PM EDT, there will be a free Bull Session: an interactive discussion with playwright MJ Kaufman, directors Will Davis and Emma Rosa Went, scholars Julie Crawford and Lauren Robertson, and members of the companies. Advanced registrations are required. ABOUT THE PLAYS Scholar Lauren Robertson of Columbia University, who will participate in an enriching online discussion on March 25, offers, "Gallathea's thoroughgoing emphasis on metamorphosis is thus a reflection on the power-and delight-of theatrical possibility: the stage has the capacity to imagine into being, that is, what otherwise only could be. The play's astonishing solution to Gallathea and Phillida's wish to marry one another embodies this power of performance. On the surface, it conforms to the heteronormative conventions of Renaissance comedy, but it also suggests, much more provocatively, that a world which celebrates gendered transformation is possible." ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS Though his career contains moments of sparkling success, the life of dramatist and writer JOHN LYLY (1554-1606), reveals a man who largely struggled for advancement within early modern England's vibrant intellectual and political culture. He was born to a literary family: his grandfather, William Lily, was a crucial figure in the introduction of Italian humanism to English education, a sixteenth-century intellectual shift that would be responsible for the explosion of English verse and drama by the opening of the seventeenth century. Lyly enrolled at Oxford in 1569, taking his MA in 1575. His aspirations were academic, but his aim to follow in his family's scholarly footsteps did not come to fruition: he was denied a fellowship at Oxford in 1574. Like so many young men who could not parlay their humanistic education into an academic post or a position at court, Lyly instead set his sights on London. Not long after taking up residence in the rapidly growing city, he published Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit: Very Pleasant for All Gentlemen to Read. The extremely popular text combined bits of wisdom and classical quotations to tell the story of a young man who aims to make his way in the world by means of his intellectual gifts - all features that directly appealed to the young men who crowded London's bookstalls in the late sixteenth century. By 1584 Lyly began writing plays for the boy companies that performed for small, select London audiences. Playwriting also allowed him coveted access to Elizabeth I's court: several of his comedies, including Gallathea, were staged for the queen. But in a theatrical culture as experimental and fast-paced as early modern London's, the mythic romance of Lyly's pastoral comedies quickly became passé. A second generation of English playwrights - John Marston and Ben Jonson among them - parodied Lyly's drama, writing highly satirical comedies for the boy companies that were gradually being supplanted by a varied roster of adult companies. Lyly's exuberant adaptations of classical sources, complex wordplay, and thoroughgoing commitment to the delights of ambiguity helped inaugurate the English Renaissance in London's playhouses. MJ KAUFMAN is a playwright and television writer from Portland, OR. Their plays include Whisper's Gone (Theatre Exile), Double Atlas (workshop at Playwrights Realm), Masculinity Max (Public Theater Studio production, Pride Plays '20 reading), Sensitive Guys (InterAct Theater and numerous theaters and schools around the country) and A Walrus in the Body of a Crocodile (Clubbed Thumb). Their work has also been produced and developed at WP Theater, Huntington Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the New Museum, NAATCO, Playwrights Realm, Colt Coeur, Yale School of Drama and the Lark Play Development Center, as well as in Russian in Moscow and in Australia. MJ received the 2017 Helen Merrill Emerging Writers Award, 2013 ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting, the 2013 Global Age Project Prize, and the 2010 Jane Chambers Prize in Feminist Theatre. MJ has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and SPACE on Ryder Farm and is currently a resident playwright at New Dramatists. MJ has been a member of the Public Theater's Emerging Writers' Group, WP Theater Lab, a core playwright at InterAct Theatre and a playwriting fellow at the Huntington Theater. MJ curated the 2016 and 2017 seasons of Trans Theater Fest at The Brick and, along with Kit Yan, founded Trans Lab Fellowship, a program to support emerging transgender theater artists. They have worked as a writer for two seasons for Netflix. Since the COVID19 pandemic began, MJ has written zoom plays for New Dramatists and Play at Home, adapted their play Sensitive Guys for the internet and worked on an audio piece for New Dramatists Plays for the Ear initiative. An alum of Wesleyan University and Yale School of Drama. ABOUT THE DIRECTORS EMMA ROSA WENT is a freelance theatre director, and currently the Drama League Classical Directing Fellow for 2020 with Red Bull Theater. In New York, she has developed and presented work with Playwrights Realm, The Drama League, Trans Lab at WP, The Tank, The Brick, Dixon Place, Access Theatre, LPAC Lab, and other venues. Outside New York includes: Weston Playhouse (Mirror Game, One Room), Scranton Shakespeare Festival (As You Like It, Richard III, Henry IV) Campfire Theatre Festival at Boise Contemporary Theatre, Barn Arts Collective. Co-founder of The Renovationists with playwright Else C. Went, co-founder Easy Leap Theatre Company. Off-Broadway and regional assisting includes: TFANA, OSF, Atlantic, Rattlestick, Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Emma is an Associate Member of SDC. BA Sarah Lawrence College. Emma is based in New York, where she also offers private coaching. WILL DAVIS is a transgender director and choreographer focused on physically adventurous work for the stage. Off-Broadway credits include: Road Show (Encores! Off-Center); India Pale Ale (MTC); Bobbie Clearly (Roundabout Underground); Charm (MCC); Men on Boats (Clubbed Thumb and Playwrights Horizons-Lucille Lortel nomination); and Duat (Soho Rep). Regional credits include: Spamtown, USA (Children's Theater Company); Everybody (Shakespeare Theater Company); A Doll's House, Part 2 (Long Wharf Theatre); The Carpenter (The Alley Theatre); Colossal (Olney Theatre Center and Mixed Blood Theater-Helen Hayes Award for best direction); Evita (Olney Theatre Center-Helen Hayes Award nomination); and multiple productions for ATC in Chicago where Davis also served as Artistic Director. He is an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the NYTW 2050 Directing Fellowship, the Brooklyn Art Exchange's Artist in Residence program, and is currently a Princeton Arts Fellow. RED BULL THEATER is committed to continuing connection during this historic time. Red Bull's online readings offer the unique opportunity to hear rarely-produced classic plays, and brand new plays in conversation with the classics, performed by the finest actors in New York. All of Red Bull Theater's current offerings are FREE, but advance reservations are recommended. Tax-deductible donations are encouraged to support Red Bull and invest in the vitality of classical theater for a contemporary audience. Since the start of the pandemic, Red Bull Theater has pivoted to free online offerings including livestreamed Benefit Readings and RemarkaBULL Podversations. These online projects cannot replace the live theater experience. There is simply no replacement for live theater. But, through these efforts Red Bull Theater strives to keep its community together and serve its mission to revitalize the classics until we can all gather safely once again to share in the singular Red Bull experience . Red Bull Theater wishes to express its gratitude to the Performers' Unions: ACTORS' EQUITY ASSOCIATION, AMERICAN GUILD OF MUSICAL ARTISTS, AMERICAN GUILD OF VARIETY ARTISTS, and SAG-AFTRA through Theatre Authority, Inc. for their cooperation in permitting the Artists to appear on these programs. Red Bull Theater, hailed as "the city's gutsiest classical theater" by Time Out New York, brings rarely seen classic plays to dynamic new life for contemporary audiences, uniting a respect for tradition with a modern sensibility. Named for the rowdy Jacobean playhouse that illegally performed plays in England during the years of Puritan rule, Red Bull Theater is New York City's home for dynamic performances of great plays that stand the test of time. With the Jacobean plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as its cornerstone, the company also produces new works that are in conversation with the classics. A home for artists, scholars and students, Red Bull Theater delights and engages the intellect and imagination of audiences, and strives to make its work accessible, diverse, and welcoming to all. Red Bull Theater believes in the power of great classic stories and plays of heightened language to deepen our understanding of the human condition, in the special ability of live theater to create unique, collective experiences, and the timeless capacity of classical theater to illuminate the events of our times. Variety agreed, hailing Red Bull's work as: "Proof that classical theater can still be surprising after hundreds of years." Since its debut in 2003 with a production of Shakespeare's Pericles starring Daniel Breaker, Red Bull Theater has served adventurous theatergoers with Off-Broadway productions, Revelation Readings, and the annual Short New Play Festival. The company also offers outreach programs including Shakespeare in Schools bringing professional actors and teaching artists into public school classrooms; Bull Sessions, free post-play discussions with top scholars; and Classical Acting Intensives led by veteran theater professionals. In partnership with The Drama League, Red Bull Theater offers The Classical Directing Fellowship, which immerses a director in the life of a company working in the classical canon, and is designed to bring diverse voices into the productions and institutions dedicated to this work. Red Bull Theater strives to be a home for all artists and theatergoers. Red Bull values and is dedicated to practicing inclusiveness on our stage, in our audience, on our staff, and within our leadership. We are committed to making antiracism a core value of our theater. We know that simply making these statements is not enough. We are committed to ongoing actions to increase racial justice and equal opportunity at our theater-doing our part to help realize a more racially and socially just theater community, city, and country. "The classics-shaking Red Bull Theater," as Time Out NY has called it, has presented 20 Off-Broadway productions and nearly 200 Revelation Readings of rarely seen classics, serving a community of more than 5,000 artists and providing quality artistic programming to an audience of over 65,000. The company's unique programming has received ongoing critical acclaim, and has been recognized with Lortel, Drama Desk, Drama League, Callaway, Off Broadway Alliance, and OBIE nominations and Awards. For more information visit www.redbulltheater.com. |
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| Link | http://www.redbulltheater.com |
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