terraNOVA Collective Presents GroundWorks New Play Series

"terraNOVA believes in getting on board with a playwright's voice and seeing the work that we are developing through to full production as best we can. We have created GROUNDWORKS as a way of laying a foundation for our work to be produced and to create new relationships with other producing entities, for ourselves and for our playwrights." - Jessi D. Hill, Associate Artistic Director.   

 

Plays will include new works by Robert Askins (Hand to God at Ensemble Studio Theatre), J. Julian Christopher (Man Boobs with The Public's Emerging Writers Group), Krista Knight (Salamander Leviathan at Joe's Pub), Andrea Lepcio (finalist for the NEA Outstanding New American Play Award for Looking for the Pony), Jennifer Lane (Harlowe at 3LD), Matthew Paul Olmos (selected by Sam Shepard as the inaugural recipient of La MaMa ETC's Ellen Stewart Emerging Playwright Award), Crystal Skillman (2010 New York Innovative Theatre Award for The Vigil or The Guided Cradle), and Ken Urban (The Happy Sad, SPF at The Public). Directors will include José Zayas (James Carter's Feeder: A Love Story; Larry Kunofsky's The Myths We Need), May Adrales (Ching Chong Chinaman with Pan Asian Rep; The Bereaved with Partial Comfort Productions) Jo Cattell (BBC, Origin Theatre Company, Net Curtain Theatre Company), Kimberly Faith Hickman (Dispatches with Epic Theatre Ensemble), John Hurley (Crystal Skillman's The Vigil or The Guided Cradle; The Lucretia Jones Mysteries with Gideon Productions),Stephen Brackett (You Will Experience Silence at Dixon Place), and Jessi D. Hill (Jeff Grow's Creating Illusion; Johnna Adams' Angel Eaters). 

 

GROUNDWORKS will run April 10-15 at The New Ohio Theater (154 Christopher Street at Washington Street). $10 suggested donation. Sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery and Monsieur Touton Wine. 

 

Pig Shit is a good boy at the end of the world. He works in the Hog Farm, dreams of the frozen city and fears the vast burning waste in between. That is until the ghost of Gunslinger rises from a pile of shit and starts an adventure that will change their world forever. 

 

Chance Stevens has a high-end job, classic good looks, and the attention of anyone he wants in the NYC gay scene. Yet something is missing in his life that he cannot live without. He embarks on a dangerous journey of self-discovery only to find the very best and the very worst of a new community of which he so desperately wants to be a part.

 

What if a scuba diver hung murdered in the center of the ocean? What if an Asexual Shrimp started to turn sexual?  And what if the portal to this troubling ocean-world was beginning to widen through the ordinary toilet of an unsuspecting suburban couple. As the two worlds collide, the distance between science and human nature begins to collapse. 

 

Two B-Boys find each other in a vacant lot anywhere in the world, while a woman sits alone at her desk searching for answers on the Internet. Another kid arrives on the scene and an explosive connection is made between the boys and the woman's Avatar. Bound by a search for the Center of Things, the four new friends invent the ultimate battle plan.

 

The past and present collide in the forms of Eleanor and Emily, two women who haunt the same room at the Elgin Institute of Mental Health. Though they live a century apart, finding each other may be their only hope of a life outside hospital walls.

 

An outsider stumbles into a foreign land in search of the perfect photograph, but ambition draws her dangerously deep into the lives of a woodcutter and his family when she participates in a ritual that exposes her own desires. 

 

May 1949. James Forrestal, President Truman's Secretary of Defense, attempts suicide and his wife commits him to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. The architect of the Cold War thinks the Russians have not only infiltrated the U.S. government, but are hiding in the bushes outside his home. If a man makes decisions he's not proud of, even if it's for the larger good, is that man still right?  

 

House painter, Glen, is transfixed on the only house that he never finished. When its childhood inhabitants return to sell the home we discover a deeply buried secret that binds him to the family.  And why hasn't he ever been invited inside?

 

terraNOVA Collective is an ever-expanding collective of artists devoted to nurturing distinct and innovative theatrical voices. We are dedicated to cultivating environments where the art of storytelling thrives, and actively seek stages for the new theatre we develop.