Ryan Tracy's ALL ABOUT MARRIAGE Plays HOT! Festival, 7/26

The HOT! Festival, Dixon Place's annual summer queer performance series, will present a semi-staged reading of the evening-length first act of ALL ABOUT MARRIAGE, the epic marriage play by RYAN TRACY, on July 26, 2011 at 9:30pm. Featuring Mikéah Ernest Jennings (The Shipment; Bellona, Destroyer of Cities), William Dixon Popp (Monodramas at New York City Opera; OTHER WORLDS), and Michelle Mola (Rumble Ghost). The reading is $15. For more information, please visit www.dixonplace.org. To reserve a press seat, email ryan@ryantracy.com.

All About Marriage is an epic play on how our lives, friendships and families are interconnect by our marriage practices and beliefs.

Act I-evening-length on its own-opens with a "Prelude" where a young couple W (Michelle Mola) and M (William Dixon Popp) ironically convince themselves to fast-forward from one-night stand to the wedding altar.

In Act I, Scene 1 - "Prenuptial," Abbie (Mola)-a liberal, suburban-to-urban transplant-has finally, if somewhat ironically, decided to marry Broc (Popp), her high school sweetheart. On the day of her wedding, she is aided by two Co-Maids of Honor, her best friends from college, gay-and-gay-married Bennie (Mikéah Ernest Jennings) and single-and-30 Regina (Daiva Dupree). Abbie's naïve view of marriage is challenged when her mother, Vicky, long divorced from Abbie's father, Donald (Lynn Berg), brings a stranger as her unannounced date to the wedding. When Abbie threatens not to go through with the wedding because of her mother's actions, everyone is left with the task of getting her to follow through with it, which, not without some hysterics, she does.

After the ceremony, Act I, Scene 2 - "Post-nuptial," Abbie is a wreck and fears the moment she must confront her mother, who only seems to know how to cause conflict. When she does just this, the entire ensemble plunges into chaos until the Reverend Zachary Ryan, a do-good Unitarian Universalist minister who presided over the wedding, emerges as a deus ex machina, preaching a message of "togetherness" that somehow convinces everyone to continue...to the reception.

Performers include Lynn Berg, Audrey Crabtree, Daiva Dupree, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Michelle Mola, William Dixon Popp, Alyssa Simon, and Bjorn Thorstad.

The reading of All About Marriage will be directed by Ryan Tracy.

(Photo credit: Queralt Jorba; by Michael Hart)

ABOUT RYAN TRACY

Ryan Tracy is a writer, performer and composer. As a theater artist, he has presented work at The Brick, Dixon Place and Abrons Arts Center. His theater works include Ian & Ethan: A Love Play (in progress), Mad Adam: A Fidelity Play, All About Marriage, and OTHER WORLDS: A play in two parts, inspired by Sarah Schulman's "Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. His music and opera (Collective Opera Company) have been performed at venues throughout New York, including The Kitchen, Park Avenue Armory, Dance Theater Workshop, PS122, La MaMa, Danspace, and Cornell University. Ryan has written music criticism for the Orange County Register. He is a contributor to The New York Press, and has been published by the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review. In 2007, Ryan founded countercritic.com, an alternative forum for contemporary arts criticism. In 2009, he was one of eight writing fellows to participate in the Performa 09 biennial. Ryan has fulfilled residencies at Yaddo and the Edward Albee Foundation.

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Lynn Berg (Donald) was recently seen in "Batz" at the Brick Theater's Comic Book Theater Festival. He's had film roles as a homicidal moth collector in "The Collector," a tormenting sprite in "A Day's Mess" and a giant robot in "Roboto Supremo." Other theatre credits include writing and acting in the NYIT Award winning "Bouffon Glass Menajoree," the Brick Theater's "Every Play Ever Written," as William Jennings Bryan in "Penny Dreadful," and the national tour and Off-Broadway productions of Tony N' Tina's Wedding. Lynn is an artistic director of Ten Directions, creator of Bouffon Glass Menajoree, Saint Arlecchino, and films "un Pote Nain (Midget Buddy)" and "Dirty Twin." www.lynnberg.com

Daiva Deupree (Regina) is an actor and a writer. She most recently appeared in the independent films, "A Lack of Gravity" and "The Bits in Between" and is a founding member of Naked Angels' new radio program, "Naked Radio." She originated the role of Marge in "Pageant Play"(written by Matthew Wilkas and Mark Setlock) at the Berkshire Theater Festival, and is the co-creator/co-star of the critically acclaimed two-woman comedy-burlesque show, "Two Girls For Five Bucks and the Ten Dollar Heartbreakers", which had a produced run at Ars Nova in New York City. Daiva studied mime in Paris at Marcel Marceau's International School of Mime; and studied improv/sketch comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade in NYC and the Improv Asylum in Boston where she was also a main-stage cast member. Oh, and she is a proud member of the Varsity Interpretive Dance Squad.

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