Cast Announced for NYC Staged Reading of Frank J. Avella's CONSENT

CONSENT, a play written by Frank J. Avella, examines the types of bulling many gay teens face, both obvious and subtle.

The cast features: Mackian Bauman, Ian Campbell Dunn, Alice Barrett Mitchell, Remington E. Moses and Ian Whitt. Stage directions are to be read by Brian Patterson.

Seth is a 16-year-old boy coming to terms with his sexuality who is bullied at school and taken advantage of by those around him. He crushes on the main bully's brother, who, much to Seth's delight, returns his feelings. Meanwhile, Seth's absent mom has returned and must battle Seth's current guardian, his high school baseball coach who seems a bit too attached to the boy. As the sequence of events unfolds, Seth becomes more and more alienated and dejected. At the heart of this work is an unapologetic teen love story between two boys.

The author began researching and writing CONSENT one week after Tyler Clementi's suicide, driven by a deep pain and anger but also a hope that other bullied teens (LGBTQ teens, in particular) would realize that they're not alone and that being different and unique is a thing to be celebrated, not denigrated.

The performance takes place on Thursday, November 17, 2016 at 6:30PM at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in SoHo (26 Wooster Street, NYC). Admission is free and there will be a wine and cheese reception following the play.

Please RSVP to consenttheplay2016@gmail.com. For more information call: 973-715-2356.

Frank J. Avella (Author) received a 2015 Fellowship Award from the NJ State Council on the Arts for his play Consent, which was a semi-finalist for the 2012 O'Neill and will be published by Adirondack Plays as part of an LGBTQ anthology this winter. He is the recipient of a 2016 Helene Wurlitzer ResidenCy Grant & Bumbalo/Chesley Foundation Playwright Award, also for Consent, a 2012 semifinalist for the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. In 2016, the teen-friendly version of Consent, #bullied, received honorable mention in the Stage Play category of the 85th Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition. Frank has written 19 full-length plays. Frank's play, Lured, about the persecution of gays in Russia, was selected for the Dream Up Festival at Theater for the New City and had 6 sold out performances this past September. Vatican Falls, set against the backdrop of the Catholic sex abuse scandal, will have its World Premiere in February of 2018 in Malta. His other work includes: For Mamma, Michael's #1 Fan, The Mad Ones and Orville Station (published in the UK by Lazy Bee Scripts). Upon reviewing Frank's farce Iris, in 2005, the Cincinnati Post wrote: "Avella's plays tend to send earthquakes through his audience's comfort zones." He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.