Theatre of NOTE continues the celebration of its 30th anniversary with SHOE STORY, written by Ben Snyder and directed by Maureen Huskey. SHOE STORY will close Sunday, May 22 at Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd. (just North of Sunset) in Hollywood.
SHOE STORY is an urban fairy tale that elicits the excitement and dark side of the shoe culture of New York in the eighties (inspired by the cult of
Michael Jordan and the explosion of materialism connected to the fetishes around sports icons). Through humor, fantasy and heart, SHOE STORY isolates and elevates the way some kids in the cities lived for a new pair of tennis shoes and sometimes got killed for them. SHOE STORY is a funny and sensitive coming of age story about PeeWee and his relationship with a mysterious street smart character, O. G. Mar, who poetically leads Peewee on a journey from the present to the past--one that O. G. Mar must face as well. The play is set in a shoe store, owned by an "overworked Korean father" who is struggling to survive. The shoe store becomes a world of street characters with clashing misfits, farcical moments, and life- changing events which ultimately provide a unique lens to NY in the eighties when the stakes of survival were high and aspirations seemed just out of reach.
ABOUT THE CREATIVE TEAM
BEN SNYDER (Playwright) is a playwright, screenwriter, and educator. His plays have been produced at PS122, New York Stage and Film, The Apollo Theater,
The Public Theater, The Vineyard Theater, Crossroads Theatre, and as part of HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. Ben has been hired to write numerous screenplays including "Harlem Remembers the Bronx" with
Mos Def and Joy Bryant attached. His short film "Hector is Gonna Kill Nate" will premiere at the Aspen Film Festival and has been nominated for a BAFTA Award. Ben is a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, a former Juilliard Graduate Playwriting Fellow, and is in his final semester of pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. As a teaching artist for the last ten years, Ben has used theater to explore social issues with high school and college-aged students throughout New York City's five boroughs. Additionally, he has been a guest director at New Africa Theatre Association (NATA) in Cape Town, South Africa and a guest artist with Arts-in-Action at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Trinidad.
MAUREEN HUSKEY (Director) is an award-winning theater director based in Los Angeles. Recent directing credits include a staged reading of Victoria Grice's Yale Drama Award winning play blu at LATC, Jennifer Barclay's The Exile of Petie Delarge for the REDCAT Now Festival and Son of Semele,
Carl Hancock Rux's Poesia Negra at REDCAT, and UCLA Live's Medea starring
Annette Bening (Assistant Director for Lenka Udovicki). Huskey's current projects include developing an adaptation of The Persians (Atossa's Dream). Under the mentorship of Travis Preston she received her MFA in Theater Directing from California Institute of the Arts (2009). Her Cal Arts credits include
Henrik Ibsen's
John Gabriel Borkman,
Ernst Toller's Hoppla, wir leben!, and
William Shakespeare's King Lear.
As co-creator and director of the New York based, site-specific theater group Red Dive from 1996-2006, she brought audiences down Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal via pontoon boat, through narrow streets of lower Manhattan, and to historic landmarks like the Lower East Side Tenement Building to explore the buried stories of New York landscapes. This experimental work garnered her a Bessie Award for 'performance "installation and new media" and support by the Creative Capital Foundation, Franklin Furnace Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Meet the Composers Fund, The Heathcote Foundation, and the
Foundry Theatre's Emerging Artist Award among others. Huskey's various independent theater projects (under the name of Brennan) in New York have been supported by Voice & Vision's Envision Development Program for Women Theater Artists, New Dance Alliance, The Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the New York State Council for the Arts, BRIC Studios, the Brooklyn
Arts Council and through independent artist residencies through The Field, among others. Her New York directing collaborations with dancers and performance artists have been presented in such venues as The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Joe's Pub, Joyce SOHO, PS122 and
HERE Arts Center. In addition to New York and Los Angeles, Huskey's directing work has been presented in festivals in Chicago, Vancouver, San Francisco and Vienna, Austria. She has been a national workshop leader for the Creative Capital Foundation's Professional Development Program since 2004. As a Rotary Fellow she received a Diploma with Merit in Drama from the University of Kent at Canterbury in England. In 2009 she won the Princess Grace Honorarium Award for Theater Directing.
Huskey has taught directing to undergraduate and graduate students at the California Institute for the Arts and led workshops in acting, movement/voice and site-specific installation to students at Western State College in Colorado, Bard College in New York through the Voice & Vision Envision Retreat and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange.
ABOUT THE CAST AND DESIGN TEAM
The cast of SHOE STORY features: Justin Alston (Thunder Chance, Eyemouth, Graffiti Bodyshop). Nikki Brown (web series: The Real Girl's Guide to Everything Else, Sheroes), Julian Evens (If Not Now When),
Alex Elliott-Funk (Akarui), Craig muMs Grant (Oz, Boston Legal), Norm Johnson (20 Second Rule, Holy Ghost), Richard PierreLouis (Barbershop 2, Holy Ghost) and Michael Yama (Bad News Bears Go to Japan).
SHOE STORY features an award-winning design team. The set design is by Sibyl Wickersheimer. The costume design is by Hunter Wells. The lighting design is by Matt Richter. The sound design is by Bryan Maier. The fight choreography is by Vonzell Carter .
SCHEDULE AND PRICING
SHOE STORY will preview on Thursday, April 14 at 8pm and will open on Friday, April 15 at 8pm and run through Saturday, May 22 at Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga (just north of Sunset) in Hollywood.
Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 7pm. Ticket prices are $22; students & seniors $18. For tickets, and details, please call (323) 856-8611 or visit
www.theatreofnote.com to purchase tickets online and to view complete schedule.
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