SPF Festival To Be Held At Public Theater Starting 7/1

The Summer Play Festival, New York's $10-ticket, smash-hit theater festival, featuring the hottest playwrights, directors and producers emerging in New York and around the world, today announced that its fifth and best season ever will be held at the celebrated Public Theater on Lafayette Street in New York's Greenwich Village.

The Summer Play Festival (SPF)—the first program of its kind anywhere—was founded in 2004 by Broadway producer Arielle Tepper Madover to give promising writers, directors and producers from around the globe the chance to present their material and craft, fully funded, in a protective environment and under the tutelage of established New York theater professionals. More than 1,000 playwrights submit scripts to the not-for-profit SPF each year.

The 2008 Festival will feature seven new plays and one new musical, and run from Tuesday, July 1 to Sunday, July 27, 2008. The productions are: The Black Suits by Joe Iconis and Robert Maddock; Esther Demsack by Billy Finnegan; Future Me by Stephen Brown; Green Girl by Sarah Hammond; Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom by Jennifer Haley; Tell Out My Soul by Jacquelyn Honess-Martin; The Ones That Flutter by Sylvia Reed, and Tio Pepe by Matthew Lopez. Tickets go on sale beginning June 1st on the SPF website (www.spfnyc.com) and at the Public Theater box office at 425 Lafayette Street from 10 AM to 9 PM Monday through Sunday (212-967-7555).

 "New York is the place every writer and theatrical artist dreams of," Ms. Tepper Madover said. "The Summer Play Festival was created to support those dreamers and to ensure that New York remains the dream capital of the world. We are proud that SPF is helping reinvigorate New York theatre from the ground up, and prouder still of the line-up we will be presenting at The Public in July."

"The Summer Play Festival is a wonderful and inspiring institution," said Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis.  "It shares our core values and in a short five years has become an integral part of the New York theater scene.  Arielle is an inspired, generous, spirited and endlessly enthusiastic producer, and we are delighted to form this partnership.  Together we can do even more to support new writers for the theater."

The SPF is a program of The  Living Room for Artists, a not-for-profit organization founded by Ms. Tepper Madover to fuel the growth of emerging theater artists and encourage people to create, attend and work in the theater.

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