Page 73 Productions Presents SEXTET Starting 10/24

Page 73 Productions has announced that it will produce a work-in-progress presentation of Sextet, written by 2008 P73 Playwriting Fellow Tommy Smith and directed by Davis McCallum, on Friday, October 24, at 3pm and Saturday, October 25, at 2pm.  The presentation is for an invited audience only.

Structured like a choral work, Sextet weaves together the doomed love lives of composers Carlo Gesualdo, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Arnold Schoenberg.  Each composer embarks on a creative venture that pulls him away from his spouse and into a life of heartbreak and loneliness.  A meditation on love and sex as outrage and hallucination, Sextet looks at the obsessive, devouring, and doomed passions of three legendary composers and at the destructive effect precipitated by their artistic pursuits.

The cast of the presentation of Sextet will include Brian Avers, Jeff Biehl, Nadia Bowers, Matt D'Amico, Ben Huber, Don Mucciacito, Valeri Mudek, Sam Tsoutsouvas, and Sarah Grace Wilson.

The production stage manager is Danielle Monica Long; design consultants are Will Pickens and  Rachel Hauck; casting director is Jack Doulin.

Tommy Smith is a New York-based playwright and director, and the 2008 P73 Playwriting Fellow at Page 73 Productions. His plays include The Wife, White Hot, Sextet, Air Conditioning, Sunrise, April's Subject, Caravan Man (with Gabriel Kahane) and Dig Nation, Demon Dreams & The Tale (with Michael McQuilken). His work has been seen at HERE Arts Center, The Flea Theatre, The Ontological Theatre, 78th Street Theatre, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Huntington Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, among others; his work has been produced internationally in Prague, Edinburgh, Athens and Montreal. He is a two-time winner of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize for emerging writers (2005 and 2006), a graduate of The Juilliard School's Playwriting Program and a recipient of the 2008 E.S.T. Sloan Grant. Recently, Tommy was awarded Creative Capital's 2008 Multi-Arts Production Fund for his theatrical collaborations with Reggie Watts. 
 
Davis McCallum directed Page 73's 2006 world premiere production of Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue by Quiara Alegria Hudes, which was a 2007 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Other New York credits include Chuck Mee’s Queens Boulevard (Signature Theater), The Turn Of The Screw, Jane Eyre, The Tempest (The Acting Company), Unbound: The Journals of Fanny  Kemble, The Belle’s Stratagem, West Moon Street (Prospect Theater Company), and Noah Haidle’s The Dakota Project and Women & Criminals (HERE). REGIONAL: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Guthrie, the Old  Globe, the O’Neill, Playmakers Rep, Cleveland Play House, Shakespeare Theater (DC), McCarter Theater/Princeton University, four summers at New York Stage & Film. OTHER: He was the Killian Directing Fellow at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a Drama League Directing Fellow, and recently received an NEA/TCG Career  Development Fellowship for Directors. He trained at LAMDA and studied at Princeton and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. 

Page 73 Productions develops and produces exclusively the work of early-career playwrights who have yet to receive wide public acknowledgement or substantial production opportunities in New York City, and ushers these playwrights’ new work from first draft to full-scale production.  Page 73 has developed and/or produced works by Peter Ackerman, Janet Allard, Michael Friedman, Kirsten Greenidge, Karen Hartman, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Julia Jordan, Krista Knight, Dan LeFranc, Kenneth Lin, Heather Lynn MacDonald, Peter Morris, Dan O’Brien, Gary Sunshine, Victoria Stewart, C. Denby Swanson, Lauren Weedman and Ken Weitzman, among others.  Works developed and/or produced by Page 73 have received subsequent productions at Primary Stages, New York’s Women’s Project & Productions, Baltimore’s Centerstage, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the ALLIANCE THEATRE in Atlanta, Steppenwolf Garage and San Francisco’s Magic Theater. Page 73 received the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation award for its work on The Unknown by Janet Allard, Shane Rettig and Jean Randich.  Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by Quiara Alegría Hudes, which Page 73 developed in 2005 and premiered in 2006, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama.  Page 73 will next present in a co-production with Soho Rep. the world premiere of Sixty Miles to Silver Lake by Dan LeFranc, directed by Obie Award-winning director Anne Kauffman (Nov. 25 – Dec. 21).

For more information about Page 73 Productions and Sextet, visit www.p73.org.

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