2013 COMMUNAL SPACES Play Festival Comes to Lower East Side Community Gardens, 9/13-29

The third annual Communal Spaces: a garden play festival will present five original plays in Lower East Side community gardens, Sept. 13-29. The festival commissions new plays inspired by specific community gardens. Audience members may attend one play or several, traveling pub-crawl style to the next garden.

This year's Communal Spaces will take place on the Lower East Side and will feature 30-minute plays by Will Arbery, Alexandra Bassett, Josh Gulotta, Angela Santillo and PatRick Shaw. All performances are free, and any donations will benefit the gardens.

Communal Spaces Schedule:
Fridays - Sundays: Sept. 13-15, Sept. 20-22 & Sept. 27-29

Tim and Tuna in Town. @ 11:00am
by Josh Gulotta in Siempre Verde
Stanton and Attorney Streets
(No performance Sept. 14)

Extinguish Yourself @ 12:30pm
by Angela Santillo in Miracle Garden
East 3rd Street between Avenues A and B

Yield! @ 3:00pm
by Will Arbery in All People's Garden
East 3rd Street between Avenues C and D

CO . OP @ 4:00pm
by PatRick Shaw in Parque de Tranquilidad
East 4th Street between Avenues C and D

Limoncello
Limoncello. @ 6:00pm
by Alexandra Bassett in Green Oasis
East 8th Street between Avenues C and D

The Plays:

Some of the gardens are more haphazard while others are more manicured. They are like jungles, or barbecue hang outs, or magical hidden places. The plays reflect the unique feeling of their garden, and turn the garden itself into a character.

Tim and Tuna in Town.
Two strangers have a chance encounter in the heart of a city gone dark.

Extinguish Yourself
A gArden Party goes horribly wrong. An Emily Post catastrophe.

Yield!
Two guys get day-drunk and talk about their moms. And there's a girl over there.

CO . OP
George is new to Little Prairie Co-op Apartments - small space, great garden, friendly neighbor, but wait-- How co-op is too co-op? Please direct your questions to the Co-op Manager.

Limoncello
Limoncello.
Old-timey tales, shared drinks in cool glass bottles, an anthem, and finally frivolity; followed by the looming space age.

The Experience
We give out maps, tell people where they can get food, drinks or coffee, and encourage exploration of the neighborhood. You'll get to know not only a series of gardens, but an entire area of the city.

For more information, visit: http://communitygardenproject.wordpress.com.

The mission of Communal Spaces: a garden play festival is three-fold. First, to make space integral to narrative; by using the garden as the primary inspiration for the story, the garden becomes a character, instead of merely a backdrop. Second, to make theater as public art; by presenting plays in municipal spaces we return to theater's roots as a populist art form. Finally, to embrace the experience of being a New Yorker; by developing a relationship not only with specific urban spaces but also with the communities that thrive within them, by making theater that directly relates to and augments these spaces and encourages exploration of not only the gardens but the neighborhood beyond, we invite our audiences to consider their relationship to the city we all call home. Love your city. Love your gardens. Plant urban roots.

Lillian Meredith (founder, producer) is a director, performer, writer and native New Yorker. Most of her work is site-specific and explores the boundaries of performance and the role of the audience in live theater. She has developed work at Dixon Place, Culture Project, Actors Theatre of Louisville, UglyRhino, Galapagos Art Space, Hunter College, The Secret Theater and Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, among others. A proud alumna of Vassar College and the National Theater Institute, Lillian is also a co-founder and member of FullStop Collective, an associated artist of foolsFURY Theater Company, and a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. www.lillianmeredith.com