New Moon Reading Series Presents Tammy Ryan's TAR BEACH Tonight

TAR BEACH was read in the 2012-2013 New Moon Reading Series. The playwright, Tammy Ryan, will be in residence at Luna Stage this week working on the play. The workshop will culminate in a reading of the revised play tonight, August 1 at 7:30 p.m.

It is July 1977 and New York City is in the midst of a brutal heat wave. Two best friends, sixteen year old Mary Claire and Mary Francis start that day sunning themselves on the roof of an Ozone Park row house. Younger sister, Reenie, is searching for her prize winning Greek Mythology Class Project: The Head of Medusa, while their parents are consumed by the battles of their troubled marriage. The Boy Crazy Marys hatch a plan to stay out all night with a bonfire on the beach, but the unexpected happens: the biggest blackout since 1965, a chance encounter with Son of Sam, and a sudden loss of innocence.

No reservations necessary. $5 suggested donation at the door.

TAMMY RYAN's plays have been performed across the United States and internationally. She won the 2012 Francesca Primus Prize awarded by the American Theater Critics Association for her play LOST BOY FOUND IN WHOLE FOODS which premiered at Premiere Stages and Playwrights Theater of New Jersey in 2010. SOLDIER'S HEART, her play about sexual assault in the military was read this year as part of Premiere Stages Playwriting Festival and is slated for production at THE REP at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in September. Her most recent play, TAR BEACH was first read in Luna Stage's recent New Moon Series, and was named a Jane Chambers Playwriting Award honoree as well as a finalist for the Terrence McNally Award. Ryan is currently at work on her first libretto for a new eco-opera inspired by Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING commissioned by Opera Theater of Pittsburgh.