NEW CITY, NEW BLOOD Allows Feedback For Developing Plays

For 35 years, Pulitzer Prize winning THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY has nurtured hundreds of playwrights through its EMERGING PLAYWRIGHTS PROGRAM. In June, 2006, we launched NEW CITY , NEW BLOOD, a play reading series designed to serve our audiences and writers even better. Curated by Michael Scott-Price, TNC Literary Manager, NEW CITY , NEW BLOOD will provide a hearing for worthy plays in earlier stages of Development. Audiences will get the opportunity to provide feedback, and artists will gain valuable insight from audience response. Be sure to check www.theaterforthenewcity.net for details about upcoming readings. Please join us!

NEW CITY, NEW BLOOD READINGS:
Next Reading Monday, February 23rd, 7:00pm
Wine and Cheese. COME EAT AND DRINK WITH US AND MEET THE WRITER!
Contribution: $5
Summer Rain by Robert Coe
Pochee Beach , San Clemente , California : Summer of '65. Two young surfers wait for a third, unsure about what might have happened to him in the course of a mysterious crime. Two young women show up on a quest for a ride to the greatest rock show of all time. SUMMER RAIN is a dark fable about spiritual ambition, violence, homophobia, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n' roll, set on a single night on a lonely patch of sand.

Bio
Journalist, award-winning playwright, author and screenwriter Robert Coe has worn many hats during his years in the art worlds of Lower Manhattan - in theater, dance, music, poetry, performance art and film.

Born in Southern California and raised there and in East Texas, he attended Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and subsequently completed course work and an oral examination for a doctorate in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. But instead of choosing a life in academia, Coe moved instead to Downtown New York, where he became a modern dancer (in the company of world-renown choreographers Bill T. Jones and Jane Comfort, among many others), then a cultural reporter for a wide range of periodicals, including The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, New York, the Village Voice, the SoHo Weekly News, and American Theatre Magazine, where he wrote mostly about dance, theater, music, visual art and adventure. In New York he also re-discovered his early love of theater. His first play, War Babies, became the first new play produced by the La Jolla Playhouse, shortly to become the Tony Award-winner for the best regional theater in the nation. War Babies received four nominations from the San Diego Theater Critics Circle, including Best New Play, as well as a Drama-Logue Award for Best Play.

The year before, Coe's book for The Photographer (music by Philip Glass, movement "constructed" by David Gordon, and direction by JoAnne Akalaitis) opened the first season of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), for whom he authored the opening festival catalogue. He also served as dramaturge and occasional co-writer for Laurie Anderson's epoch-making BAM spectacle, United States: Parts I-IV -- a work which introduced performance art into the international mainstream. Coe subsequently received new play commissions from the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, BAM and Music-Theater Group in New York City, and the legendary Lower East Side performance collective Mabou Mines, and eventually returned to BAM and the Next Wave in 1991 with the season-opening Endangered Species, directed by Martha Clarke. In the commercial musical theater he fashioned an entirely new book for the Tim Rice/ABBA musical Chess, directed by three-time Tony Award winner Des McAnuff, which enjoyed a seven-month, coast-to-coast national tour.

Coe's first book, Dance in America (E.P. Dutton), was the official companion work to PBS's celebrated "Dance in America" television series. He is presently working on a series of book-length memoirs, including NOTHING LIKE I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE: An Autobiography of Downtown New York, 1974-1989, and JOCK: A Memoir of the Counterculture. He has also co-written (with McAnuff) a screenplay, PERFECT LIGHT, for the Walt Disney Company.

This performance reading is directed by Robert Coe.
Please rsvp to: literary@theaterforthenewcity.net

FUTURE NEW CITY, NEW BLOOD READINGS :
Some of the future playwrights include:
Johnny Klein
Lazarre Seymour Simckes
Matthew Swan
Aurin Squire