Rising Phoenix Repertory to Host CINO NIGHTS Book Reading, 6/28

Rising Phoenix Rep (Daniel Talbott, Artistic Director) will host an event to launch the newly published CINO NIGHTS: Plays from Rising Phoenix Rep, edited by Daniel Talbott and Addie Johnson and with a foreword by Todd London, on Thursday, June 28th at 6:00 p.m. at The Drama Book Shop (250 West 40th Street, between 7th and 8th Ave). The collection includes new plays by Mando Alvarado, Courtney Baron, Jessica Dickey, Emily DeVoti, Kristen Palmer, Gary Sunshine, Adam Szymkowicz, and Lucy Thurber. It is published by The New York Theatre Experience, Inc.

Free and open to the public, the event will feature readings of scenes from plays by Lucy Thurber, Emily DeVoti, Gary Sunshine, and Kristen Palmer, and a discussion about the Cino Nights series. Playwrights DeVoti, Thurber, Sunshine, Palmer, and Szymkowicz will be on hand to sign copies of the book, and refreshments will be served.

Todd London, artistic director of New Dramatists since 1996 and author of The Artistic Home, Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play (with Ben Pesner), wrote in the books forward, “Cino Nights are after that elusive grail of the theater: Something else again. The new thing that reminds us. The new energy that reignites us. The speed that unearths that which might take a lifetime to investigate and fully express. Something else again and again and again.”

Inspired by Joe Cino and his Caffe Cino—one of the original birthplaces of Off-Off-Broadway theatre and early home to such writers as Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick, John Guare, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and William M. Hoffman—New York Innovative Theatre Award-winning company Rising Phoenix Rep commissioned nineteen playwrights to write new, full-length plays for the Seventh Street Small Stage, the intimate back room space at Jimmy’s No. 43 in the East Village, where the company has mounted critically acclaimed and award-winning productions of new plays for the past six years.

Rising Phoenix Rep artistic director Daniel Talbott described the series as a place to tap into the raw, inspired, inventive, and pioneering work of the Caffe Cino, where the love of theatre and new plays was joined with a scrappy, do-it-yourself work ethic. All shows have been rehearsed for a week and then fully mounted and produced, warts and all, for one night only with free admission to overflow crowds.

Playwright Cusi Cram, whose play Radiance premiered as part of Cino Nights on June 10, 2012, spoke with excitement about the series. “As a playwright, it’s great to write something knowing it will actually be produced,” she remarked.

The eight playwrights whose works appear within these covers possess strong, compelling, individual voices, and by any measure are among the leading theater artists of their generation. Collected in this volume are eight plays from the first eight months of the series: Gary Sunshine’s Best Sex Ever, Mando Alvarado’s (O)n The 5:31, Courtney Baron’s Here I Lie, Kristen Palmer’s The Stray Dog, Emily DeVoti’s The Upstart, Lucy Thurber’s Named, Jessica Dickey’s Row After Row, and Adam Szymkowicz’s Clown Bar.

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