The Workshop Theater to Present Industry Reading Of PULP VERITE By Crystal Skillman

Pulp Vérité, a new play by playwright Crystal Skillman will receive a 29-hour reading with the award-winning The Workshop Theater. The presentation will culminate in two readings on March 6th at 3 and 7 PM, at the A.R.T/NY studios (520 8th Avenue), in the Bruce Mitchell Room. The reading is free, and reservations can be made at www.workshoptheater.org.

In the play, the main character, Joy, is an active member of the filmmaking collective Pulp Vérité when she is captured and held overseas for four years. After being released from captivity, she returns to the United States to reunite with her friends and restart her life. But when the group realizes Joy has gathered them together for the impossible: to bring her sister who is still a captive with ISIS home, their strength as a collective, youthful ideology, and commitment to the cause are shaken to the core.

Thomas Coté, Artistic Director of The Workshop Theater, struck by the play's important message, especially in our current climate, notes: "Crystal Skillman's Pulp Verite is a passionate and harrowing story about the importance of art in finding truth. It's the kind of playwriting that quickens the pulse and engages the mind."

Originally a Clifford Odets Ensemble Play Commission, Pulp Vérité was named on the 2019 Kilroys List (Honorable Mention). The play was also awarded a workshop at Michigan State University, and featured at the Playwrights Foundation in their 2018 Rough Readings series . "As a play, Pulp Vérité owns the naiveté of these young American filmmakers, but also that the ideals that they once held are fading fast. Joy represents America itself in many ways, and as the play builds, we theatrically plunge head first into the results of too little too late. With all we are currently politically facing in this country, and the earned criticism of our place in the world internationally, Pulp Vérité itself is a race against time," Skillman shares.

The reading will be directed by Kareem Fahmy (3/Fifths, New York Times Top 5 Must-See Shows), with dramaturgy provided by Megan Sandberg-Zakian (House of Joy, The Niceties). The play features: Latoya Edwards (The Rolling Stone, School Girls; or the African Mean Girls Play), Peter Mark Kendall (The Americans, Six Degrees of Separation), Andrea Abello (Paloma Prisoner), Julia Valen (Nice Things), Maggie Metnick (Diaspora) and Nikki Massoud (Homeland, A Doll's House Part II). Lisa R. Stafford is stage manager, and Hannah Sikora will read stage directions.

Crystal Skillman (Playwright) is an award-winning dramatist and was noted by The New York Times as "one of downtown's most bracing talents." She is an NY Innovative Theatre Award winner, an alumni of Youngblood, the WP and Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and is an EST member. Plays include NYTimes Critics Picks Open (The Tank), King Kirby (The Brick), Geek (Vampire Cowboys), and Cut (Theatre Under St. Marks), as well as Another Kind of Love (Chopin Theatre), and Wild (Lucille Lortel MCC Reading, IRT). New plays include Pulp Vérité (Kilroys List Honorable Mention) and Rain and Zoe Save the World (EMOS Prize). Crystal is the book writer of the musical Mary and Max (Composer/Lyricist Bobby Cronin), winner of the MUT Award Critics Prize. Mary and Max premiered at Theatre Calgary, and has just finished a highly-acclaimed production in Europe at Landestheater Linz.

Kareem Fahmy (Director) is a Canadian-born director and playwright of Egyptian descent. He has directed a number of world premiere productions including James Scruggs's 3/Fifths (3LD, New York Times Top 5 Must-See Shows), Sevan K. Greene's This Time (Sheen Center, New York Times Critics' Pick), Bess Welden's Refuge*Malja (Portland Stage), Adam Kraar's Alternating Currents (Working Theater), Nikkole Salter's Indian Head (Luna Stage), and Victor Lesniewski's Couriers and Contrabands (TBG Theatre, also co-creator). Kareem is the co-founder of the Middle Eastern American Writers Lab at The Lark and a co-founder of Maia Directors, a consulting group for organizations and artists engaging with stories from the Middle East and beyond.

Megan Sandberg-Zakian (Project Dramaturg) is a freelance theater director based in Jamaica Plain, MA, with a passion for the development of diverse new American plays & playwrights. She is a co-founder of Maia Directors, a consulting group for artists and organizations engaging with stories from the Middle East and beyond, and her first book, There Must Be Happy Endings: On a Theatre of Optimism and Honesty is forthcoming from The 3rd Thing Press in March. Recent stage directing projects include the world premieres of Nathan Alan Davis' Nat Turner in Jerusalem at New York Theatre Workshop, Madhuri Shekar's House of Joy at California Shakespeare Theatre, and Eleanor Burgess' Chill at Merrimack Repertory Theatre.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP THEATER

Now under the direction of Thomas Coté (Artistic Director) and Philip Callen (General Manager), The Workshop Theater has a long history fulfilling its mission of the rigorous development and production of new American plays and musicals that transport, challenge and surprise both artists and audiences. Notable successes include extensively developing A Peregrine Falls by Leegrid Stevens ("a richly dark and rending drama" The New Yorker), The Man Who Was Peter Pan by Allan Knee (debuted at The Workshop and became the basis for the Academy Award nominated film "Finding Neverland" and the Broadway musical of the same name) and The Navigator by Eddie Antar (recipient of two Drama Desk nominations).

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