Next NEW CITY, NEW BLOOD READINGS SERIES Takes Place 3/16

For 35 years, Pulitzer Prize winning THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY has nurtured hundreds of playwrights through its EMERGING PLAYWRIGHTS PROGRAM. In June, 2006, we launched NEW CITY , NEW BLOOD, a play reading series designed to serve our audiences and writers even better. Curated by Michael Scott-Price, TNC Literary Manager, NEW CITY , NEW BLOOD will provide a hearing for worthy plays in earlier stages of Development. Audiences will get the opportunity to provide feedback, and artists will gain valuable insight from audience response. Be sure to check www.theaterforthenewcity.net for details about upcoming readings. Please join us!

NEW CITY, NEW BLOOD READINGS:
Next Reading Monday, March 16th, 7:00pm
Wine and Cheese. COME EAT AND DRINK WITH US AND MEET THE WRITER!
Contribution: $5
Open Rehearsal by Lazarre Seymour Simckes
OPEN REHEARSAL, a family drama in chaotic rehearsal: the author is ejected; scenes occur out of sequence; actors forget lines; the cast fights over how the script should end, then the director decides to kill the finale as everyone plays instruments, dances, accuses, and cajoles one another. Comedy slaps tragedy in the face for the right to be on stage.

Bio
Lazarre Seymour Simckes, playwright, novelist, psychotherapist, and translator from the Hebrew--has taught at Harvard, Yale, Williams, Vassar, Brandeis and Tufts, as well as at Bar-Ilan and Haifa University in Israel. A graduate of Harvard College (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Stanford University (Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow, M.A.), and Harvard University (Ph.D.), Simckes has also conducted live, interactive writing workshops via satellite linking middle school and high school students across the country, including the Virgin Islands. During his Fulbright year at Haifa University, he conducted a similar workshop linking Israeli Arab and Jewish high school students with their counterparts in America ("Celebrating Differences").

His first play, "Seven Days of Mourning" (adapted from his novel published by Random House), was staged at Circle in the Square. Clive Barnes called it "spiky, yet intensely moving. A 'Fiddler on the Roof' without music, but with blood. Unique, wild, funny. It still haunts me." Other plays include "Ten Best Martyrs of the Year," a TNC production directed by Crystal Field and reviewed by Michael Smith in the Village Voice as "timeless, mythic, enlivened by all kinds of stylistic intrusions and an almost hysterical inventiveness," and Nossig's Antics," another TNC production directed by Crystal Field, which the critic Richard McBee called "a riveting puzzle."

His play "Minutes," a burlesque encounter between Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler, had a semi-staged reading at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center last November, and his epic farce "Soldier Boys" about Czar Nicholas's 1827 edict to recruit Jews into the Russian army for the first time, including children as Cadets, which is slated for a fall 2007 production with Judd Hirsch as the Czar.

Simckes has received numerous awards: Littauer Foundation Playwriting Grant, Ingram Merill Foundation Grant, National Jewish Book Award (for a translation from the Hebrew), and two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.

As a practicing psychotherapist, Simckes has worked with multi-problem families and incarcerated sex-offenders.
The current play "Open Rehearsal" was picked by Edward Albee as first runner-up in the inaugural 2006-2007 Yale Drama Series Competition.

This performance reading is directed by Lazarre Seymour Simckes.
Please rsvp to: literary@theaterforthenewcity.net

FUTURE NEW CITY, NEW BLOOD READINGS :
Some of the future playwrights include:
Johnny Klein
Matthew Swan
Aurin Squire

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