THE PUMPKIN PIE SHOW Plays UNDER St. Marks, Now thru 10/10

FRIGID New York @ Horse Trade will present the seventeenth annual presentation of The Pumpkin Pie Show, with stories written by master storyteller Clay McLeod Chapman and performances by Chapman and downtown superstar Hanna Cheek. The production will run tonight, September 24, through October 10 at UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1st Avenue and Avenue A) with performances Thursday through Saturday at 8pm. Tickets ($18; $15 students) may be purchased in advance at www.horseTRADE.info.

True story: Clay's about to become a daddy. There's a baby boy on his way. The due-date? No lie... October 31st. A Halloween baby. And Clay is scared. Really scared.

There's nothing more petrifying than one's own impending parenthood, especially with the clock tick-tick-ticking away-so we here at The Pumpkin Pie Show have decided to explore those fatherhood-fears and bring them to the stage. Every story within this year's show focuses on the primal paranoia of parenting, whether it be mammoth diaper discharges, flying the friendly skies with screaming kids, or coming up with compelling ways to convince your children to eat their din-din...

...Not to mention sasquatch erotica, ancient mystical runes, and a special homemade recipe for Jesus juice. This year's Pumpkin Pie Show has it all. You've been warned.

Parents can bring their babies to the show for free!*

*WARNING: Due to content, this show is not advised for anyone under the age of 16.

CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN is the creator of the rigorous storytelling session The Pumpkin Pie Show. Publications: rest area, miss corpus, and The Tribe trilogy-Homeroom Headhunters, Camp Cannibal and Academic Assassins (Disney). Film: The Boy (SXSW 2015), Henley (Sundance 2012) and Late Bloomer (Sundance 2005). Theatre: Commencement, Hostage Song (w/ Kyle Jarrow), and SCKBSTD (w/ Bruce Hornsby). Comics: Edge of Spider-Verse, The Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man and Vertigo Quarterly: SFX. He is a writing instructor at The Actors Studio MFA Program at Pace University.

HANNA CHEEK has been a member of The Pumpkin Pie Show since 2001, performing in BoogetyBoo (USM), Junta High (PS122), Hostage Song (The Kraine), Commencement (NY, US, & Canada), among many others. With Waterwell (member since 2003) she's divised and performed in: The Persians...a comedy about war with five songs (Perry St. Theatre), Marco Millions (Theatre Row), The/King/Operetta(Barrow St.), #9 (59e59), and GOODBAR (The Public Under the Radar festival. Other NYC: Sovereign (with Gideon, The Secret Theatre), Happy Birthday (with TACT, the Beckett Theatre), Artifacts of Consequence (Wild Project). Regional: Other Desert Cities (Hailey, Idaho). TV: The West Wing, Titus, MTVs Undressed, Ugly Americans. Described by TONY as a "downtown superstar" Cheek was named one of Time Out New York's "Future Legends of NYC Theatre" in 2013.

THE PUMPKIN PIE SHOW Celebrating its second decade of performances, the Pumpkin Pie Show is a literary fist in the face. Part storytelling session, part boxing match, part shamanistic ritual, the Pumpkin Pie Show has established itself as an all-points artistic hodgepodge of theatre and literature. We pick and choose the essentials of both mediums, channeling their rocking properties in order to create a more intimate relationship between performer and audience. We want to see the whites of our audience's eyes. Certain basic rules that we've set up for all our shows are: No sets. No costumes. No nothing beyond the text and the performance itself. Our goal is to strip away those elements that we find extraneous to the tale being told, conjuring up an atmosphere of "creating something out of nothing," as well as focusing on that ethereal connective tissue between the one telling the story and our audience. Packed with enough emotional intensity to feel like a rock concert rather than just spinning a yarn, the Pumpkin Pie Show is pure bedtime stories for adults.

FRIGID New York is a theater development group with a focus on new work that produces a massive quantity of stimulating downtown theater every season. FRIGID's Resident Artist Program offers a home to a select group of Independent theater artists, pooling together a great deal of talent and energy. FRIGID New York grew out of the annual FRIGID Festival, the first and only festival of its kind in New York City to offer artists 100% of their box office proceeds, and Horse Trade Theater Group, a self-sustaining theater development and management group.