Victory Gardens Theater Announces Chicago One-Minute Play Festival Participants

Victory Gardens announces the 50 playwrights who will participate in The Chicago One-Minute Play Festival as a benefit for the Victory Gardens Fresh Squeezed series. The event will be held in the Zacek-McVay Theater at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue in Lincoln Park on May 15 and 16, 2011, at 7:30pm.

The Chicago One-Minute Play Festival will include VG Ensemble playwrights Lonnie Carter, Joel Drake Johnson, Nick Patricca, James Sherman. Participating playwrights who have been part of VG's IGNITION include Christopher DePaola, Kristoffer Diaz, Michael Golamco, Chisa Hutchinson, Leonard Madrid, Tanya Saracho, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Andrea Thome.

Other participating playwrights include Shepsu Aakhu, Usman Ally, Seth Bockley, Aaron Carter, David Cerda, Joshua Conkel, Randall Colburn, S.L. Daniels, Bilal Dardai, Philip Dawkins, Lisa Dillman, Zayd Dohrn, Mike Ervin, Wendell Etherly, Darna Lynn Formby, Andrew Gerle, Idris Goodwin, Stephen Louis Grush, Andrew Hinderaker, Reeny Hofrichter, Patricia Kane, Nambi E. Kelley, Laura Lacqmin, Evan Linder, Arlene Malinowski, Chelsea Marcantel, Patrick McLean, Mia McCullough, Jake Minton, Carlos Murillo, Brett Neveu, Justin Palmer, Caitlin Parrish, Emily Schwartz, Robert Tenges, Marisa Wegrzyn and Nick Zagone.

Directors include Megan Carney, Sydney Chatman, Brenda Didier, Julieanne Ehre, Andrew Hobgood, William Rogers, Brant Russell, Jeffry Stanton, Jaime Totti and Erica Weiss. The stage manager is Caty Mick. The Chicago One-Minute Play Festival is curated by Dominic D'Andrea and produced by Will Rogers.

One hundred, one-minute plays by 50 established and emerging playwrights will be commissioned for the two-night only event. A One-Minute Play is a form of theatre that looks at the ten-minute play form and structure, and distills it down to the most immediate story-telling event or core emotional content. The evening promises to be as quick as it is epic in its scope.

The One-Minute Play Festival was created in New York in 2007 by Dominic D'Andrea to promote the spirit of radical inclusion for writers of different age, gender, race, culture and point of career. The One-Minute play challenges the playwrights to expertly craft a theatrical moment. It requires a new sensibility to work in this deceptively small form.

"The sixty-second ‘nano plays' have been very successful in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Brunswick, NJ and New York, where there is now an annual festival. Fresh Squeezed is thrilled to be working with Dominic to challenge our playwrights in this new form," says Fresh Squeezed Producer Will Rogers. "It's badass to have this many artists we admire working on one project, including artists at various points in their careers who have worked at our favorite theaters of all sizes, including Victory Gardens, Writers', Theater 7, Hell in a Handbag, Strange Tree, Chicago Dramatists, Neo-Futurists, The New Colony, About Face, Northwestern, DePaul, Young Chicago Authors, House, Redmoon, Collaboraction, Teatro Vista, Teatro Luna, XIII Pocket, UIC and Route 66, among many others."

The Chicago One-Minute Play Festival facilitates a community of playwrights, actors, directors, and community-at-large to participate in the challenge and creation of progressive short-form theatre. The festival is a true community-based event, and has a sense of both local and national position.

Playwright essays and comments about their experiences with the festival will be posted on a blog, www.oneminuteplays.wordpress.com.

Logistics and Amenities
Performances are at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue, in the heart of Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood. Tickets are $15 and are available through the Victory Gardens Box Office, 773.871.3000 (tty: 773.871.0682), email tickets@victorygardens.org, or visit www.victorygardens.org.

Parking
Discounted parking is available one block south at Children's Memorial Hospital for all shows except weekday matinees (no overnights). Metered and street parking is available, but mind the neighborhood parking restrictions.

Public transit
By CTA train, take the Red, Purple or Brown lines to the Fullerton stop. Walk east on Fullerton to Lincoln, then north 1/2 block to the theater. The #8 Halsted, #11 Lincoln, #37 Sedgwick/Ogden, and #74 Fullerton CTA buses all stop at the corner of Fullerton and Halsted, 1/2 block south of the theater. See transitchicago.com for times and routes.

Pre- and post-show dining
See www.victorygardens.org for a list of Victory Gardens' neighborhood dining partners. Each is within walking distance of the Biograph, and all offer a special discount to patrons who present a Victory Gardens ticket stub.

About Fresh Squeezed
Fresh Squeezed brings together provocative and exemplary artists in a series of special performances seeking out new, diverse audiences. Through language, music, poetry and history, Fresh Squeezed explores the varied ways theater is being performed today and surveys the performing arts medium to bring fresh new perspectives to the stage.

Fresh Squeezed encourages new people to visit the theater and poke around. Not just new audiences - but also new writers and performers and cultures and ideas. We are a theater dedicated to tending new plays, and in our rapidly diversifying cultural landscape, Fresh Squeezed allows us to cast a wide net and find hidden treasures that are relevant to our community. But don't get the wrong idea; it doesn't all have to be that heady. Victory Gardens is about some nonsense and laughter too.

About Victory Gardens Theater
Under the leadership of Artistic Director Dennis Za?ek and Executive Director Jan Kallish, Victory Gardens Theater is home to the bold voices of world premiere theater. The company features the work of its own 14-member Playwrights Ensemble, as well as that of exciting playwrights who are changing theater in the U.S. and abroad. Since its founding in 1974, the company has produced more world premieres than any other Chicago theater, a commitment recognized nationally when Victory Gardens received the 2001 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. The company's dedication to developing, supporting and producing new work makes Victory Gardens an American Center for New Plays.

In 2006, Victory Gardens successfully completed an $11.8 million renovation of Chicago's famed Biograph Theater, and moved two blocks north from its longtime venue at 2257 N. Lincoln Avenue, to its beautiful new home in one of Chicago's most celebrated historic landmarks. Renamed Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, the new venue is a state-of-the-art 299-seat mainstage which has greatly expanded the company's artistic flexibility, while enhancing Victory Gardens' ability to welcome patrons old and new.

In 2009, Victory Gardens completed the second phase of renovation at the Biograph, building an intimate, new, 109-seat studio theater on the second floor. On March 1, 2010, at a special launch event for Victory Gardens $1 million Campaign for Growth, the theater's new studio was officially named the Richard Christiansen Theater, in honor of the Chicago Tribune chief critic emeritus and longtime champion of Chicago's live theater scene. Visit www.victorygardens.org/campaignforgrowth for more details.

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