INTAR Announces 2013 Winter/Spring Season

INTAR (Lou Moreno, Artistic Director/John McCormack, Executive Director) today announced the two plays for its Winter/Spring 2013 season: Lucy Loves Me, written by Migdalia Cruz, directed by Lou Moreno, and Pinkolandia written by Andrea Thome, directed by Jose Zayas. Lucy Loves Me will begin performances Off-Broadway Friday February 22nd continuing through March 24th. Pinkolandia begins performances Friday, May 3rd and will continue through May 26th.
Both Lucy Loves Me and Pinkoldandia are products of INTAR's legendary Maria Irene Fornés Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory (MIF HPRL).

In 1981 Maria Irene Fornés, the master dramatist/director and influential teacher, launched the HPRL at INTAR to develop the work of Latino theater artists and to examine Hispanic American cultural heritage. Many of the students Fornés trained -- including Migdalia Cruz, Cherrie Moraga, Eduardo Machado, Nilo Cruz and Caridad Svich -- became the most widely produced Latino/a playwrights in the US, prompting recognition of Fornés as the inspiration of a generation of new voices in the American theater.

Fornés led the HPRL until 1994. In 2011, the lab was renamed in her honor. Today the MIF HPRL continues to focus on developing its participants' playwriting skills, building resources to further their pursuit of playwriting, and providing an integrated support for theater artists participating in HPRL along with INTAR's Actors' Collective and Main Stage production series. Caridad Svich is the current director of the lab.

Migdalia Cruz's coming of age story, Lucy Loves Me, will kick off INTAR's 2013 season. Lucy dreams of not having to deliver pizza, Cookie dreams of a cabaret career, and Milton dreams of bleeding. Lucy delivers a pizza to Milton. Milton randomly calls Cookie. And when Cookie invites him over, Lucy answers the door. Is this a recipe for love?
Migdalia Cruz was trained by Fornés at INTAR between 1984 and 1991. Cruz credits Fornés for inspiring her to write Lucy Loves Me. "Irene gave us an exercise in class where we were to remember a song that we associated with a memory of water," says Cruz, "and Only Tell Me - a dark piece by Béla Bartók in a deadly minor key - was the song I not only recalled, but re-lived as I sang it in my mind. Somehow that song came to symbolize all that was horrible and awkward - danger, poverty, trapped by circumstance, and a yearning for love. That's when the character Lucy was born."
Andrea Thome developed Pinkolandia at INTAR's lab between 2007 and 2009. Pinkolandia is a deep, inventive play about finding home in a new place: two young sisters living in Reagan-era Wisconsin create imaginary worlds to make sense of their Chilean parents' exile and troubled marriage. One daughter copes by wrestling with the political and cultural issues she's hearing about, the other by escaping into a world of pure fantasy.
Migdalia Cruz, born and raised in the Bronx, is an award-winning playwright of more than fifty plays, operas, screenplays, and musicals including Fur, Miriam's Flowers, Frida, Dreams of Home, Cigarettes & Moby-Dick, El Grito Del Bronx, and Another Part of the House, produced in venues as diverse as National Theater of Greece/Athens, Old Red Lion/London, Houston Grand Opera, Classic Stage Company, Ateneo Puertorriqueño, San Francisco's campoSanto and Latino Chicago Theater Company where she was writer-in-residence. Her plays produced at INTAR include Not Time's Fool, Welcome Back to Salamanca, The Have-Little, & Miriam's Flowers. She also translated three plays by Mexican playwrights through the Lark's Mexico/US Word Exchange. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and was mentored by Maria Irene Fornés at INTAR. TWO ROBERTS: a Pirate-Blues Project commissioned by the Lark with a NYSCA grant received a studio workshop last year. She is currently at work on Satyricoño at INTAR and an annotated translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters. Her latest collection of plays published by NoPassport Press, entitled El Grito Del Bronx, features: El Grito Del Bronx, Yellow Eyes, Salt, and Da Bronx Rocks-a part of "Song For New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting" presented by Mabou Mines.

Andrea Thome is a Chilean-Costa Rican, Wisconsin-born, self-described 'mutt' who grew up navigating the multiple landscapes and languages that inhabit her plays. She lives in New York, where she co-directs FULANA, a media collective that creates cutting political/cultural parodies (www.fulana.org), and directs the Lark Play Development Center's US-México Playwright Exchange.

José Zayas was born in Puerto Rico and graduated from Harvard and Carnegie Mellon Universities. Zayas has held residencies at numerous theaters including Repertorio Espanol, the Ensemble Studio Theater and INTAR, where he served as co-producer of the 2006 Neworks Lab. His credits include Caridad Svich's In the Time of the Butterflies (Repertorio Espanol) and The House of the Spirits (Denver: 5 Ovation awards including best direction; Repertorio Espanol: multiple ACE and HOLA awards, including best production and director; Teatro Mori, Chile), Madre, el drama padre (ACE and HOLA awards, Repertorio Espanol), Nowhere on the Border (ACE and HOLA awards, Repertorio Espanol), Letters to a Mother (ACE and HOLA awards, Repertorio Espanol), among many others.

Lou Moreno directed Drawn and Quartered by Maggie Bofill, which was developed in INTAR's NewWorks Lab, and was INTAR's inaugural production under his leadership. Other directing credits include Trying by Erin Browne (The Bushwick Starr); Minotaur a Romance and Beautiful by David Anzuelo (LAByrinth Theater Company at The Public Theater); MCC Youth Festival (Manhattan Class Company); Kingdom (NYMF); End of the Line (MCC Youth Company); Rock/Paper/Scissors (NY Hip-Hop Theater Festival at The Public Theater); The Bigger Man (Partial Comfort); and Blues for a Gray Sun by Nilaja Sun (INTAR). He also serves as an Associate Producer with The 24-Hour Company (Athens, Greece and Broadway). Moreno won the 2005 Princess Grace Award for Directing.

Caridad Svich received the 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the novel by Isabel Allende. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times, including in the year 2012 for her play Magnificent Waste. Most recently, 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award winner GUAPA received a rolling world premiere; her play Love in the Time of Cholera, based on the novel by Garcia Marquez, premiered at Repertorio Espanol; and The Tropic of X received its English-language premiere. Among her other plays: 12 Ophelias, Any Place But Here, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man's Blues, Fugitive Pieces, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), Instructions for Breathing, The Way of Water, and the multimedia collaboration The Booth Variations. www.caridadsvich.com

INTAR, one of the United States' longest running Latino theatres producing in English, works to:
Ø Nurture the professional development of Latino theater artists;
Ø Produce bold, innovative, artistically significant plays that reflect diverse perspectives;
Ø Make accessible the diversity inherent in America's cultural heritage through an integrated program of workshops, productions of works-in-progress, and mainstage productions. INTAR brings to the public vital and energetic voices of emerging and accomplished Latino theater professionals, giving expression to the diversity and depth of today's Latino-American community.

Performances will be Wednesday through Saturday evenings at 8PM and Sundays at 5 PM. Tickets are $35 each or $50 for a subscription to both shows. Tickets may be purchased at www.intartheatre.org or by calling 212/352-3101. Performances will take place at INTAR's theater space (500 West 52nd Street, at Tenth Avenue, on the 4th Floor). For more information, visit INTAR on the web at www.intartheatre.org.