NICTC Present THERE HAVE BEEN OTHER MEN IN MY WIFE'S BED

Baltimore's newest gang of artists, Nine Imaginary Cows Theater Collective, presents a brand-spanking-new work for the stage: There Have Been Other Men in My Wife's Bed (A Marital Arrangement for 3 Actors), running February 26 through March 7 at Theatre Project (45 West Preston Street, Baltimore). Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8pm for both weeks, with a special 7pm performance on Sunday, March 1. Ticket prices are $20 for General Admission, $15 for Seniors and Artists, and $10 for Students. Tickets can be purchased over the phone by calling Theatre Project at 410-752-8558, or online by visiting missiontix.com. For more information, visit www.theatreproject.org.

Written and directed by Tom Shade and performed by his three fellow company founders - Temple Crocker, Ben King and Stephanie Santer, with musical help from singer/guitarist Bobby Smith - There Have Been Other Men in My Wife's Bed is part lyrical chamber piece and part manic stream of theatrical consciousness. As it follows the three actors in their persistent but futile attempts to perform the play named in the title (a dream-haze of a play examining the playwright's actual marriage to one of the onstage actors), the show is by equal turns disquieting and jarringly hilarious, forcing its audience to continually question whether anything that they are seeing is real. Interlaced with original songs and unexpected poetry, There Have Been Other Men in My Wife's Bed turns a harsh and unsparing light on a real-life marriage broken by mistrust, all while the show races breathless and panic-stricken through the slippery process of writing itself in front of our eyes.

"One of the interesting things with this play is that the actors are all playing versions of themselves - but not necessarily truthful versions," says Shade. "They're basically playing dream-logic versions of themselves, which means that the audience is constantly wondering what's real and what's not. We have a lot of fun with keeping them guessing."

9 Imaginary Cows Theater Collective was founded in January by four recent graduates of the Towson Theatre MFA program: Temple Crocker, Ben King, Stephanie Santer and Tom Shade. The collective was formed with the hope that it would serve as a foundation of mutual support for the development and production of bold new works for the stage in Baltimore, with an emphasis on the exploration of new forms of theatrical play-making.

9 IMAGINARY COWS THEATER COLLECTIVE
There Have Been Other Men in My Wife's Bed
(A Marital Arrangement for 3 Actors)

FACT SHEET
Location: Theatre Project (45 West Preston Street, Baltimore)
Dates: February 26 through March 7
Performance Times:
Thursday through Saturday (Feb. 26, 27, 28, Mar. 5, 6, 7) at 8pm Sunday, March 1 at 7pm

TICKETS
Theatre Project Phone Number: 410-752-8558 Or missiontix.com

Stage Manager: Victoria Natalia
Lighting Design: Todd Staffieri
Director/Playwright: Tom Shade

CAST
Temple Crocker
Ben King
Stephanie Santer
Musician: Bobby Smith

9 IMAGINARY COWS THEATER COLLECTIVE
TEMPLE CROCKER was born in Georgia, grew up in North Carolina and after attending college in Charleston, South Carolina moved west to San Francisco where she lived for eleven years. During this time she had the opportunity to perform and create work with a variety of directors, writers, choreographers and musicians including Mark Jackson, Sommer Ulrickson, Loy Arcenas, Philip Gotanda, Will Waghorn, Tom Ontiveros, Pearl Ubungen, Sean Hayes and Rowena Richie. It was in San Francisco that Temple met her long-time friend and collaborator Annie Kunjappy. From 1996 to 2003 they created work under the name Strangefruit making six original performances including Heat Death of the Universe based on the short story by Pamela Zoline and Sewing Lessons based on the art and lives of surrealist painters/writers Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Both projects were supported by the Zellerbach Family Fund and Sewing Lessons was honored with a Bay Area Critics Circle award nomination in 2001 for best direction and costume design. In 2003 Temple moved back to the east coast to attend Towson University's Theatre Arts graduate program. Her first performance in Baltimore was a collaboration with artist/performer Jackie Milad at the Transmodern Age Festival in the spring of 2004. Since then she has presented work at spare room, CHELA, Creative Alliance and the Baltimore Theatre Project. For the past three years she has had an ongoing relationship with the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York presenting new work at the Summer Series in 2005 and acting in Richard Foreman's ZOMBOID in the spring of 2006. In 2008 Temple co-founded the performance collective Woof Nova. The collective's most recent work Hearts and Tongues was presented at the Ko Festival of Performance in Amherst Massachusettes in the summer of 2008 and again in the fall at The La Mama Theatre in New York. Temple teaches acting and movement courses at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Towson University and Stevenson University.

BEN KING is a professional performer currently residing in Baltimore, MD. He received his B.A. in Theatre Studies fromGuilford College in Greensboro, NC, where he performed such roles as El Gallo in The Fantasticks and Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull. He studied abroad through the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he lived in Kerala, India studying kalarippayattu martial art form and kathakali dance-drama. After acting for a few years in New Mexico and Atlanta, GA--favorite roles include Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Chicklet in Psycho Beach Party, Ben moved to Baltimore. He received his M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from Towson University, where he focused his studies on physical performance. For his thesis he created a solo performance piece entitled On Edge which combined elements of clown, mask, and butoh. In 2008 he received a Maryland State Arts Council Award for Solo Theatre Performance. He has performed with the Naoko Maeshiba Performance Collective in the D.C. Metro Dance Award-winning piece Trace, which premiered at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage as a part of their Local Dance Commissioning Project. Trace continued its run at D.C.'s Dance Place. Ben recently collaborated and performed in the Aerial Theatre Productions adaptation of The Snow Queen. Spearheaded by Mara Neimanis and Monique Holt, The Snow Queen--originally commissioned for QuestFest--transforms the original Hans Christian Anderson story using mask and aerial theatre and bridges deaf and hearing performance. His most recent appearance at Theatre Project was as Mr. Oolong in Pferdzwackur's Vampire Nutcracker. Ben performed in the original version of There Have Been Other Men in My Wife's Bed.

Originally from West Virginia, STEPHANIE SANTER has worked as an actor, singer and teacher in the Philadelphia/Wilmington/Baltimore area since 1996. Stephanie recently received her MFA in Theater from Towson University, where she performed her one-woman clown show: Chatter vs. Ladder (...in a pitter-patter matter...). She continues to perform professionally with two chamber-reading projects: The Butterfly Lovers Concerto featuring violinist, Xiang Gao and Distant Voices, a dramatic reading of one Japanese-American man's diary of experiences from the internment. Other performance credits include: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Helena-Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival), It's All True (InterAct Theater), Bed and Sofa (Wilma Theatre); and with City Theter Company in Wilmington, Delaware-Into the Woods (Cinderella), Merrily We Roll Along (Mary), The Vagina Monologues (Director/Reader), Dirigible (Laura), Angels in America Part I: Millennium Approaches (Harper), The Food Chain (Amanda) and multiple roles in The Delaware 10-Minute Play Festival (1999-2004). With the Delaware Symphony, Stephanie read the part of the Devil in Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale). As a singer, she performed with Opera Memphis (Frasquita, Carmen), Opera Festival of New Jersey and OperaDelaware. Stephanie has also been a voice teacher since 1997-with Merion Mercy Academy, the Grand School of Music and her private studio. From 2000-2004, Stephanie worked as a theater Teaching Artist for: MBNA Academy, Latin American Community Center, Grand Opera House Arts Education, Delaware Wolf Trap and the Delaware Institute for Arts in Education. Stephanie is currently raising two sons with her husband Tom.

TOM SHADE is a playwright, director and teacher living in Baltimore. Tom co-founded City Theater Company (Wilmington, Delaware) in 1993, serving as the company's Co-Artistic Director and full-time Executive Director from 1993 through 2004. During those eleven years, Tom produced every CTC production and directed approximately half of them. CTC directing credits include: Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along; Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches; Nicky Silver's Fat Men in Skirts, Raised in Captivity, and The Food Chain; Christopher Durang's Laughing Wild, Baby With the Bathwater and The Marriage of Bette and Boo; Dan Dietz's Dirigible; Michael Ching and Hugh Moffatt's world premiere opera Out of the Rain (Co-Director); as well as The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged). As the Festival Coordinator for City Theater's annual Delaware 10-Minute Play Festival, he directed nearly sixty ten-minute plays between 1996 and 2005, as well as numerous one-acts. He served as musical director for two City Theater shows: Into the Woods (2003) and The City Theater 10-Year Anniversary Cabaret (2003), and he directed the company's improv comedy troupe, Just Kidding! Onstage he portrayed Leon Czolgosz in Sondheim's Assassins and Ralph Langston in Howard Rice's solo one-act, Cool. Between 1994 and 2002, he also designed sound for every City Theater stage production. In the community, Tom oversaw City Theater's collaboration with the Delaware Department of Probation and Parole (with company actors volunteering as part of the department's monthly training exercises), as well as overseeing the development in 2000 of City Theater's educational outreach program, the Delaware Safe Dating Project, which sends actors out into area middle schools and high schools to engage students in an interactive theatrical exercise exploring the dangers and prevalence of teen dating violence. In Frederick, Maryland, Tom was a founding member of the comedy improv troupe The Comedy Pigs. He is currently finishing up work on his thesis as part of the requirements for his MFA in Theatre from Towson University.

A native of the Midwest, Bobby Smith started playing blues and rock-and-roll professionally in the early 1980's. His first record, "Two Sides," was nominated for two Washington music association "Whammies". Since that time Bobby has been playing a blend of what he considers American music, rock-and-roll, blues, R&B, and rockabilly, mostly on the east coast and in Holland. In addition to solo and single band shows he has done shows with Roy Buchanon, Gatemouth Brown, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells, Elvin Bishop, Danny Gatton, and The Stray Cats. Bobby also performs solo acoustic shows in which he does folk-blues, by artists like Mississippi John Hurt, Norman Blake, Johnny Winter, and his own original material.

 

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