Forrest Malloy's NINA at Theaterlab Adds Performances and Talkbacks With Cat Cohen and Kathryn Gallagher

Due to popular demand, Nina, a new play by two-time O’Neill semi-finalist Forrest Malloy, has added two performances (Friday, February 7 at 2pm and Saturday, February 8 at 2pm) to its strictly limited engagement at Theaterlab (357 W 36th Street, Manhattan). Additionally, the production, which opened on January 26 and must close on February 9, will host talkbacks with comedian and actor Cat Cohen (Netflix’s The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous) on February 1 and with Grammy-winner and Tony-nominee Kathryn Gallagher (Jagged Little Pill) on February 6. Directed by Katie Birenboim, Nina invites audiences into the women’s dressing room at a prestigious New York City conservatory.

Nina centers on five young actresses in their final year of study who laugh and cry, fight and flirt, compete, plan, and dream… until a shocking revelation forces them to confront the foundations of their bonds. As final performances of Chekhov’s The Seagull loom, themes of love, art, and unfulfilled potential echo onstage and off. Nina is a fast-paced, behind-the-scenes look at the always high-stakes, often ridiculous environment of actor training, illuminating the tensions, intimacy, and even cruelty that define the making of great art and the strongest of female friendships.

The cast of Nina includes Francesca Carpanini (Broadway’s All My Sons & The Little Foxes), Jasminn Johnson (Broadway’s Ain’t No Mo), Lortel recipient Aigner Mizzelle (Broadway’s Chicken & Biscuits, nicHi douglas’ pray), Katherine Reis (Broadway’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Max’s Gossip Girl), and Nina Grollman (Broadway’s To Kill A Mockingbird & The Iceman Cometh).

“Some very kind people have called Nina my 'love letter to the theater’,” says playwright Forrest Malloy. “For me, Nina is a reaffirmation, maybe to a corpse, but a reaffirmation all the same. While it does deal with questions of ambition and the high price of being an artist, I think the play finds most of its power in the dynamics between its five young women. The gay male fascination with Women has yielded a long line of cultural iterations, some base (the Housewives universe), some vivid and complex (Tennessee Williams, the Housewives universe). I hope Nina takes her subjects seriously but refuses to let them off the hook. And I hope she makes audiences laugh their asses off.” 

“I’ve spent my entire life — educational, professional, and otherwise – fascinated by relationships between women,” says director Katie Birenboim. “For me, it’s not just about ‘girl power’ or pink pussy hats (though those are great too), but the complex dynamics that underscore these relationships: with love comes hate, with envy comes admiration, with intimacy comes misdirection, and all the other juicy feelings in between. These juxtapositions and tensions are what make female friendships so strong, so interesting, and so ripe for study and the stage.”

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