WE WERE NOTHING! to Run 1/17-2/2 Inside a Private Union Square Loft

Drawing from actual emails, chat transcripts, and text messages, We Were Nothing! is an intimate site-specific theater experience about two childhood friends staying connected and losing touch.

The piece was written by playwright Will Arbery in collaboration with Shelley Fort, Elly Smokler, Emilie Soffe, and Lisa Szolovits. The production, which will be directed by Lisa Szolovits, will star Elly Smokler (Stop the Virgens at St. Ann's Warehouse; member of The Bats) and Emilie Soffe (In the Bloodat the Kennedy Center). The creative team will include Lighting Design by Isabella Byrd (Assoc. on 13P/Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play) and Costume Design by Clara Fath.

We Were Nothing! will play a three-week engagement January 17 - February 2, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 5pm. The show will be performed inside a private residence near Union Square. Exact address and directions will be released only to ticket holders. Tickets ($20) are available online at www.artful.ly/store/events/2099.

WILL ARBERY (Playwright) is a writer, filmmaker, and theater artist who is working towards an MFA in Writing for the Stage and Screen at Northwestern University. He lived for two years in New York, and his plays there included: The Confession (reading at The Creek and Cave/Platform Group, semi-finalist for Princess Grace Award, O'Neill Playwrights Conference), You're Sadder Than You Realize (Dixon Place, dir. Lisa Szolovits), Yield, Bitch! (Communal Spaces, dir. Stella Powell-Jones), The Dust Veil of 536 A.D. (#serials@theflea, dir. Nathan Shreeve), Bleak (Tiny Rhino, dir. Jess Chayes), Paula & Strom (co-written with Elena Belyea, NextFest in Alberta, Canada), How Kim Sa-Rang Got Her Name (Hearth Gods, dir. Knud Adams), a site-specific performance of We Were Nothing! (dir. Lisa Szolovits), and Six Windows Presents A Hero of Our Time with Calliope Theatre Company (dir. Will Dagger). He's performed at the Kennedy Center, Invisible Dog, Jimmy's No. 43, Nylon Fusion, and Dixon Place, and for the Institute for Psychogeographic Adventure and Good Cop/Great Cop. His writing has been published by Better: Culture and Lit, decomP, Thickjam, Every Day a Century, Snow Monkey, Chronogram, The Awl, The New Professional, Red Branch, Hypervocal, Defenestration, and D Magazine. Two of his short pieces, How to Be a Man and The Logic, were recently part of Teatro Vista's Late Night series. He grew up in Dallas, Texas, the only boy with seven sisters.

LISA SZOLOVITS (Director) is a Brooklyn-based director and developer of new plays. She has made work on the East Coast with the Playwrights Horizons Resident Workshop, Ars Nova, Dixon Place, Columbia University, NYU, The Assembly, UglyRhino, Tugboat Collective, Lost Theater, Manhattan Shakespeare Project, and Williamstown Theatre Festival, as well as with Theatre of NOTE and Circle X Theatre Co. in Los Angeles. In New York, Lisa has assisted Leigh Silverman, Trip Cullman, and Emily Mann as a directing resident at Playwrights Horizons, as well as Thomas Kail (Lincoln Center: American Songbook), Jean-Michele Gregory and Michael Sexton (The Public). In addition to planned productions of We Were Nothing! and You're Sadder Than You Realize, about Justin Bieber and an 18th century French cannibal, with Will Arbery, Lisa is currently developing The Exquisite Corpse Project, a transnational collaborative theater piece performed in Google Hangout, with Amy Clare Tasker and Wolfgang Wachalovsky, Dido & Venus, an adaptation of Virgil's Aeneid and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis poem devised with Aubrey Saverino, and a social psychology experiment employing laser tag technology in a performance about the power of the Gaze with NYU's Social Perception, Action, & Motivation Lab.