JACK Announces Summer Season

JACK doesn't go slack in the summer. From a festival of experimental music to a revival of a Wallace Shawn scorcher to poets and rappers reflecting on reparations, JACK brings action to the steamy months. This season features artists we feel are bringing life to our mission of fueling experiments in art and activism, including theater company Sister Sylvester, poet and writer collective Oye Group, director Knud Adams, playwright Amina Henry and burgeoning theater ensemble TV.

Ensemble Pamplemousse:
Chance & Circumstance Festival
With Nate Wooley, Jaimie Branch, Lester St. Louis, Madison Greenstone et al
June 15 - June 17
Tickets: $15 at door, $10 in advance, with $40 festival pass available

Ensemble Pamplemousse presents its second annual festival for experimental arts at JACK. The focus of this year's festival is on solo artists bending instrumental tradition, from composed pieces to improvised sets, with a few duos and trios included for good measure. The festival features new collaborations by Ensemble Pamplemousse members Bryan Jacobs and Weston Olencki, performances by instrumentalists Leila Bordreuil, Lester St. Louis and Madison Greenstone, among others, as well as the first duo performance by jazz trumpet mavericks Jaimie Branch and Nate Wooley.

Oye Group:
Ghetto Hors d'Ouevres: Reparations
June 22 & 23 at 8 pm
Tickets: $20

JACK favorites Oye Group share an evening of rap, poetry and songs addressing the topic of reparations, in partnership with JACK's newly-extended series, Reparations365. In a city that is home to more artists in the U.S. than any other, Ghetto Hors d'Oeuvres sparks dialogue on complex issues of immigration, economics and survival through the richness of art, poetry and music. Enjoy free hors d'oeuvres and bear witness as an eclectic group of NYC artists, both native and immigrant, decipher the block and break down the rock that is the foundation and cornerstone of the city we call home. Performances are followed by a DJ set, conversation and dancing.

Performers: Elisabet Velasquez, Roya Marsh, Nick E Finn, Paula Ramirez, Mariana goycoechea, Kleaver Cruz, Jerome Geyer, Keomi Tarver, 7 perception & Will mula.
Curator: Elisabet Velasquez & Oye Group
Director: Modesto Flako Jimenez

Sister Sylvester:
Maps for a War Tourist
July 29 - July 30
Tickets: $15

Last year, theater company Sister Sylvester made a performance based on research into the Turkish activist, Ayse Deniz Karacagil. Deniz was killed by sniper fire in northern Syria in the days before their performance opened. This production at JACK, one year later, allows the company space to deepen their reflection on Deniz's life and and reconsider the work they made in the light of events that followed. In trying to tell her story, the company reflects on myths, legends and movements connected to the tortoise: from the father of tragedy, Aeschylus, who was killed by a falling tortoise; to the Czech anti-fascist underground in the Second World War, who painted the image of the tortoise on toolboxes as a call for slow-down strikes, as part of a clandestine pacifist resistance.

Featuring: Kathryn Karaoglu Hamilton, Cyrus Moshrefi, Kelsea Martin, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

Marie and Bruce
By Wallace Shawn
Directed by Knud Adams
July 12 - 28
Tickets: $18

Produced by John Early and Allie Jane Compton
with:
Theda Hammel as "Marie" + sound designer
Gordon Landenberger as "Bruce" + set designer

Today, Marie decides to leave her husband: "Let me tell you something. I find my husband so God damned irritating that I'm planning to leave him. And that's a fact." But in Wallace Shawn's 1978 American masterpiece, facts are slippery things. In this radical reimagining at JACK, two multi-disciplinary artists play the combative titular couple and head up the design team. Joined by an ensemble of some of Brooklyn's sharpest comedic voices, Gordon Landenberger (Bruce) and trans actress Theda Hammel (Marie) double as the set and sound designers, respectively, for this hilarious and timely new production.

Knud Adams (director) is a director of new and experimental plays. His recent productions include Tin Cat Shoes (Trish Harnetiaux, Clubbed Thumb), Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen (Eliza Bent, Abrons), The Workshop (Torrey Townsend, Soft Focus), Asshole (Justin Kuritzkes, JACK), On a Clear Day I Can See to Elba (Eliza Bent, The New Ohio), Every Angel is Brutal (Julia Jarcho, Clubbed Thumb), Tom & Eliza (Celine Song, JACK), That Poor Girl and How He Killed Her (Jen Silverman, U. of Rochester), Krazytown (Jenny Schwartz, NYU), and Snore (Max Posner, Juilliard). He is a Drama League Artist in Residence and a former Drama League Directing Fellow, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab member, and Playwrights Horizons Directing Resident. www.knudadams.com

Hunter John and Jane
By Amina Henry
August 2 - 18
Tickets: $18

In her third production at JACK, playwright Amina Henry shares a ghost story, with songs, about a homeless man who is approached in the park by the ghost of a murdered prostitute. The ghost enlists him on a quest to find her remains so that her grieving mother can finally bury her and move past her mourning. Hunter John and Jane approaches trauma, mental illness and violence towards women in a whimsical way, giving the audience the opportunity to engage with difficult topics through poetic language as well as through a rich musical and visual landscape. With this play, Henry re-imagines what a love story can be, re-imagines what a musical can be, and proposes a world in which all lost or missing individuals are worthy of being found.

Amina Henry (playwright & producer) is a Brooklyn-based playwright and producer. Productions include: Ducklings at JACK, The Animals at JACK (developed with The Brooklyn Generator), Happily Ever at Brooklyn College, An American Family Takes a Lover at Theater for the New City, Bully at Interrobang Theater, Water produced by Drama of Works and The Minstrel Show, produced as part of the 2013 Bring a Weasel and a Pint of Your Own Blood Festival at 13th Street Theater/CSC (NYC). Her work has been developed by and/or presented at: The New Group, The Flea, Clubbed Thumb, National Black Theater, Barefoot Theater, Little Theater at Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, OR), Kitchen Dog Theater (Dallas, TX) and Interrobang Theatre (Baltimore, MD), among others. She has been a participant in Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers, Page 73's Interstate 73 writers group and Ars Nova's emerging writers group. She is also a recipient of a 2017-2018 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Space Grant. For somewhat up-to-date information, go to aminahenry.wordpress.com.

TV presents:
Sehnsucht
Presented by The Habitat Theater Company
August 23 - September 1
Tickets: $18

sehn·sucht (noun): inconsolable longing in the human heart for we know not what

In this collaboratively-created play by blossoming theater company TV, the ensemble unpacks the longing one can feel for another time and place, whether real or imagined: childhood, years without war, early human history, a time when everyone enjoyed the outdoors and raised chickens and heard gossip from the neighbors, when strawberries were tiny and sour. With choral odes by Deepali Gupta, this whimsical show hops millennia in its exploration of what once was or never was at all.

Created by TV
Written by Michael Norton
Music and Lyrics by Deepali Gupta
Directed by Sarah Blush
Produced by Caroline Gart and Ryan Gedrich with The Habitat

TV is a theatre company consisting of director Sarah Blush, performers Brian Bock and Georgia Lee King, and writer Michael Norton. They build plays for performance. Their work tends to be funny, historical, athletic and absurd.

JACK's presenting season is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts - Art Works program, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, New Music USA's NYC New Music Impact Fund (made possible with funding from The Scherman Foundation's Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund), Brooklyn Arts Council, The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Mental Insight Foundation, The Santvoord Foundation, The Laura B. Vogler Foundation, The Lida Foundation and M & T Charitable Foundation.

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