Playwrights, Creatives Announced for F*It Club's THE SPRING FLING: REBOUND at IRT Theater

F*It Club, the New York Innovative Award-winning film and theatre company, continues its annual series of short, commissioned world-premiere plays at the IRT Theater as part of their 3B Development Series in Manhattan's West Village with The Spring Fling: Rebound, seven new short plays by Ngozi Anyanwu (Good Grief), Lucy Boyle (The Blue Deep), Liza Birkenmeier (Radio Island), Ryan King (Burying Augustus), Dan Moyer (Half Moon Bay), Matthew Paul Olmos (So Go The Ghosts of Mexico), and Leah Nanako Winkler (Kentucky).

The works will be directed by Saheem Ali, Sash Bischoff, Jess Chayes, John Giampietro, Anne Haney, Candis C. Jones and Annie Tippe.

Performances will be Thursday, May 11th through Sunday, May 21st with Wednesday through Saturday night performances at 8pm and Sunday matinees at 2p. Tickets are $18 and available at brownpapertickets.com and at the door. IRT Theater is located at 154 Christopher Street, 3rd Floor, in New York, NY. For more information, visit www.facebook.com/effitclub.

Designed to showcase high-quality, world-premiere ten-minute plays, The Spring Fling offers emerging and established playwrights the chance to develop their work with the support of professional directors and designers and a cast of exceptionally talented New York artists. This annual series presents simple, writer-centric productions that add to the canon of thematically rich, complex and original ten-minute plays.

Previous Spring Fling playwrights have included Kevin Artigue, Brooke Berman, Hilary Bettis, Lucy Boyle, Bekah Brunstetter, Jon Caren, Stephanie Del Rosso, Matthew Lee Erlbach, Halley Feiffer, Kate Gersten, Jason Grote, Ashlin Halfnight, Elizabeth Irwin, Nick Jones, Greg Keller, Anna Kerrigan, Krista Knight, Victor Lesniewski, Caroline V. McGraw, Catya McMullen, Seth Moore, Greg Moss, Janine Nabers, Isaac Oliver, Erica Saleh, Sarah Sander, Heidi Schreck, Mark Schultz, Mark Sitko, Tommy Smith, Ariel Stess, Daniel Talbott, Joe Tracz, Lauren Yee, and Anna Ziegler. The Spring Fling series has been nominated for a total of ten New York Innovative Theatre Awards and won two consecutive years.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Ngozi Anyanwu is an overall Renaissance Woman. Education: University of California San Diego's (MFA acting) Point Park University (B.A) Acting :The Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Barrington Stage, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and The Mark Taper Forum. TV credits: Limitless, Deadbeat, The Affair, Law and Order SVU and Mysteries of Laura and the upcoming show The Deuce. Producer: 1st Generation Nigerian Project, Co-Producer and Director of New Play Development of Now Africa's Playwrights Festival. Director: She Gon Learn, by Lisa Strum for the Emerging Arts Festival, United Solo Festival, National Black Theater; Black Love. Playwrighting: Good Grief, Victory is Ours and The Homecoming Queen. Anyanwu is also a recipient of the Djerassi Artist Residency.

Lucy Boyle's plays have been read/seen at theatres including Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Cherry Lane/Barefoot Theatre Company, Guild Hall, the Hangar Theatre, Trinity Repertory Company, and Manhattan Theatre Source. She is an received her BA and MFA at Brown University), and is an alum of EST's Youngblood Playwrights Collective. She was awarded a Dramatists' Guild Fellowship and a John Golden Incentive Award from Hunter College. She wrote for the ABC Family television series HUGE. Her play THE BLUE DEEP open the 2012 season at Williamstown.

LIZA BIRKENMEIER is currently collaborating with Daniella Topol and Sheila Callaghan on an interactive piece about water that will premiere in 2017, co-produced by New Georges and 3LD. She is a new member of the 2016-2017 Emerging Writers Group at The Public Theater and a Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow. She is an alum of Play Group at Ars Nova and a New Georges Affiliated Artist. Her work has been seen or heard at Ars Nova, The Working Theater, BAX, The San Diego Museum of Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Catch Series, Prelude, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Dixon Place, The Invisible Dog, New Georges, The San Francisco Playhouse, City Theatre in Pittsburgh, and the Classic Coin Laundry. She has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony. She received her BA from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon.

Ryan King grew up in Austin, TX, and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. His plays include Burying Augustus, Gigantic F***ing Worms, Later Hour, Loveshack in '87, Always On, Some Things Were Missed, Here, and The Horse You Rode in On. He's a current member of the Ars Nova Playgroup, Primary Stages Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group, the 2016 Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, and the Rattlestick Theater's Actors Who Write Group. He's also a former member of the 2014-2015 Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group. His plays have been developed by Cape Cod Theatre Project (twice), Naked Angels, Rattlestick Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Colt Coeur, Primary Stages, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Theater of NOTE, and Ground Up Productions. As an actor, he has appeared regionally and Off-Broadway at theaters including the Atlantic Theater Company, Second Stage, PS 122, HERE Arts Center, Barrington Stage, Hartford Stage, Studio Theater, and the Huntington Theater. Education: Yale School of Drama and the University of Texas at Austin.

Dan Moyer is a Brooklyn-based playwright and founding member of Shelby Company, which produced his plays Fallsway, You May Be Splendid Now and Winnemucca. With Jonathan Goldberg he created the alt-comedy show Ephemerama and has written for the podcast Limetown.

Matthew Paul Olmos is a three-time Sundance Institute Fellowship/Residency recipient (2014 Lab, 2013 UCROSS, 2009 Time Warner Storytelling Fellow), National Latino Playwriting Awardee from Arizona Theatre Company, Baryshnikov Arts Center Resident Artist, Princess Grace Awardee in Playwriting and was named by Sam Shepard as the inaugural recipient of the La Mama E.T.C.'s Ellen Stewart Emerging Playwright Award. Dramatists Guild Fellow, New York Theatre Workshop Fellow; Primary Stages Dorothy Strelsin New American Writer's Group playwright; Brooklyn Arts Exchange Resident Artist, INTAR H.P.R.L playwright, Rising Circle Collective writer, terraNOVA Collective playwright, and is a Ensemble Studio Theater lifetime member. Holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from The Actor's Studio Drama School (now New School for Drama), a B.A. in Playwriting from UC Santa Barbara, and was given UCLA's GOP Award for Graduate Playwriting.

LEAH NANAKO WINKLER is a Japanese American playwright from Kamakura, Japan and Lexington Kentucky. Her play KENTUCKY was among the top 10 on the 2015 Kilroys List and recently received an Off-Broadway Premiere at Ensemble Studio Theatre in coproduction with Page 73 and the Radio Drama Network. It subsequently received a West Coast Premiere at East West Players in November-December 2016. Leah is also the author of Two Mile Hollow (2016 Kilroys Honorable Mention, CAATA conference), Death For Sydney Black (terraNova Collective, 2014 Kilroys Honorable Mention), Diversity Awareness Picnic (2014 Kilroys Honorable Mention), Double Suicide At Ueno Park (EST/Marathon) and The Adventures of Minami: The Robot From Japan Who Makes You Feel Safe When Loneliness Is Palpable (The Brick). With playwright Teddy Nicholas, she cowrote Flying Snakes in 3-D!!! which enjoyed performances in 2011-2012 at Ars Nova (ANT Fest), The Brick Theater and the New Ohio Theatre (Ice Factory ). Leah's work has been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, New York Theatre Workshop, The Bushwick Starr, The Flea Theatre, Primary Stages, Artists at Play and more. Her experimental stuff has been performed all throughout the city at places like little theatre @ Dixon Place, Prelude Festival, Bowery Poetry Club and more. She was an artist in residence at New Group/Urban Arts Initiative , a winner of the 2015 Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival, a 2015 and 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nominee, a two time recipient of the A/P/A commission for the Japanese American National Museum, a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship for Creative Writing, a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Playwrights Group, a 2016 Sloan Commission recipient with the Ensemble Studio Theatre, a commissioned writer with 2G, a 2016-2018 Time Warner fellow at the Women's Project, an alumnus of Youngblood and a 2017 Sundance/Ucross Fellow. The New York Times called her a "distinctive new voice."

F*IT CLUB (Allyson Morgan, Executive Director) is an award-winning New York based company of film and theatre artists, founded in 2010, which produces short plays, short films, and short-term events. F*It Club is committed to providing equal opportunity for all of its members. We hope to build both a home and a community for artists to share, grow, and create. Our company was founded with the goal to provide access and opportunity. We say "f* it" to waiting for opportunity to knock. We are seizing opportunity and making it ours. We want to make work and we want to make it NOW.

IRT THEATER is a grassroots laboratory for independent theater and performance in New York City, providing space and support to a new generation of artists. Tucked away in the old Archive Building in Greenwich Village, IRT's mission is to build a community of emerging and established artists by creating a home for the development and presentation of new work. Some of the artists we have supported include Young Jean Lee, Reggie Watts, Mike Daisey, New York Live Arts, terraNOVA Collective, Immediate Medium, The Nonsense Company/Rick Burkhardt, CollaborationTown, Rady&Bloom,Thomas Bradshaw, Crystal Skillman,Tommy Smith, May Adrales, Katt Lissard, Erica Fay and many others. For info visitwww.irttheater.org. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Office of Councilmember Corey Johnson and The Nancy Quinn Fund, a project of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York(A.R.T./New York)

The Spring Fling: Rebound is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

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