Red Bull Theater to Close 12th Season with 2016 Short New Play Festival

Red Bull Theater today announced that their Twelfth Season will conclude with Red Bull Theater's annual festival of 10-minute plays of heightened language and classic themes features two brand new commissions from Lisa D'Amour and Amy Freed alongside 6 brand new plays chosen from hundreds of submissions from playwrights across the country. The 2016 Short New Play Festival will be Monday July 25th (7:30pm) at Lucille Lortel Theatre. This year's plays will be Motley Fool by Kate Abbruzzese, Swan Song by Emily Taplin Boyd, Malaprop by Lisa D'amour, The Ghoul Of Amherst by Amy Freed, Warp And Weft by Anchuli Felicia King, Her Father's Daughter by Dakin Matthews, The Eighth Circle by Bridgette Dutta Portman, and The Opulent Complex by Lynn Rosen. Tickets may be purchased online at www.redbulltheater.com or by phone at (212) 352-3101.

Each year, the company selects new works of heightened language and classical themes from today's top established and emerging playwrights. Inspired this year by the theme of scandal, these scribes will conjure wildly diverse tales, catapulting classical theater into the future. Tickets will be only $25! The 2016 Short New Play Festival is made possible by the generous support of The Noël Coward Foundation.

Kate Abbruzzese is a New York City based actress and recent graduate of the NYU Grad Acting program. Her other play, Before the Storm, about Caliban and Miranda's time on the island prior to The Tempest, was performed at NYU's Freeplay Festival, and was one of three plays (and one excellent clown show) selected to be remounted for NYU's callback weekend. Currently, she is performing as Jessica in The Merchant of Venice and Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona at Shakespeare & Co. When not acting, she writes and illustrates the cartoon "heartfelt", about a little heart's adventures in the forest.

Emily Taplin Boyd is a playwright, actor and director. Her first two plays were performed in Barrington Stage Company's 10x10 New Play Festival. As an actor, Emily appeared in NYC and regionally (including Red Bull's reading, The Admirable Crighton). She is a proud member of AEA. As a director, Emily staged an award-winning production of her own translation/adaptation of Euripides' Andromache. Emily has a Classical Acting degree from LAMDA, an AB in Performance from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Medieval/ Renaissance Studies from Columbia, where she focused on performance and pedagogy in Anglo-Saxon England. Swansong is her third play. www.emilytaplinboyd.com

Lisa D'Amour is a playwright and interdisciplinary artist. She is one half of the OBIE-Award winning performance duo PearlDamour. Her plays have been commissioned and produced by theaters across the country, including The Women's Project, Playwrights' Horizons, Manhattan Theater Club, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, Clubbed Thumb, Steppenwolf Theater Company (Chicago) The Wilma Theater (Philadelphia), Woolly Mammoth Theater (D.C.) and the Royal National Theater (London). Lisa's play Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn prize. Lisa is a core member of the Playwrights' Center and a recent alumna of New Dramatists. PearlDamour.com

Amy Freed was nominated as a finalist in the drama category of the 1998 Pulitzer Prizes for her play Freedomland. Her play The Psychic Life of Savages won the Joseph Kesselring Award and the Charles McArthur Award for outstanding new play. She wrote the The Beard of Avon, Safe in Hell,You, Nero, The Monster-Builder, Hell to Pay, and more. Her work has been produced at New York Theatre Workshop, Seattle Repertory, American Conservatory Theater, Goodman Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and other theaters around the US. She currently teaches acting and playwriting at Stanford University.

Anchuli Felicia King is a playwright, composer and designer of Thai-Australian descent. Her writing for the theatre is marked by a playfulness with language and a hybridization of forms and subjects. (Anchuli) Felicia served for many years as the resident Sound Designer for Four Letter Word Theatre in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently completing her MFA at Columbia University, where she is specializing in dramaturgy. Outside of school, she is passionate about international new play development, composing for dance and designing Augmented Reality technology for the theatre.

Dakin Matthews is a playwright, dramaturge, translator, and actor. His verse play The Prince of LA won the Ted Schmitt Award for best original play (Los Angeles, 2005). He won a special Drama Desk Award for his adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV (Lincoln Center, 2004). His verse translations of Spanish Golden Age plays have won four Walker Reid Awards. His plays Uncommon Players and Feast of Ashes were commissioned by The Old Globe, San Diego. The Great Fugue was produced in the Plays-in-Progress program at ACT (San Francisco). His one act "Tea" was part of the Antaeus Company's Ten-Minute Play Festival. He has appeared in over 250 stage productions, over 250 episodes of television, and over 30 films. He is currently appearing in Waitress in New York, his sixth Broadway production.

Bridgette Dutta Portman's plays have been read and produced in the San Francisco Bay Area, across the country, and overseas. She is currently president of the Playwrights' Center of San Francisco, a founding member of Ex Nihilo Theater, an associate artist at Wily West Productions, and a member of the Pear Writers' Guild. She is pursuing an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University. Her short comedy "The Pequod Meets the Ocean Steward" was included in Red Bull's 2014 Short New Play Festival, and she is delighted to be returning this year with another comedy featuring verse and classical themes. More information about Bridgette and her plays can be found at http://bridgetteduttaportman.com.

Lynn Rosen's plays have been produced or developed with Actors Theatre of Louisville, TheatreWorks (Silicon Valley), Women's Project, New Georges, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Centerstage (Baltimore), Studio Theatre, Red Bull Theater, Working Theater, Barrington Stage, The New Group, The Lark, terraNOVA Collective, New Harmony, GEVA, Fault Line, The Brick, among others. Lynn co-writes/co-created the award-winning web series "Darwin," directed by Carrie Preston, which was named one of the "Top Ten Best Web Series of 2015" by Paste Magazine. Upcoming: Bernhard, UCSB; The Firebirds Take the Field, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, Chicago; I Love You, Playing On Air. Lynn is a Resident Playwright at New Dramatists.

Red Bull Theater's OBIE Award-winning Revelation Readings (Monday evenings at 7:30pm) present staged readings of new and rarely performed classic plays from all eras and cultures. With the Jacobean plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as the cornerstone of our mission, Red Bull Theater is dedicated to the rediscovery and re-investigation of classics from all eras and cultures, and to the development of new plays of heightened language and classical themes. Revelation Readings provides a unique opportunity to hear these plays performed by many of the finest actors in New York.

All tickets are only $25.

Upgrade your ticket and take home some special summer reading from the festival. Red Bull Theater has partnered with Stagerights.com to publish highlights from the first five years of the Short Play Festival. These two books offer the most delectable of these compact works - some downright silly, others powerfully moving. For just $35 get a ticket to the SPF and one collection; for $45 get a ticket and both collections.

These two collections, Red Bull Shorts Volumes 1 and 2, feature the best of Red Bull's annual Short New Play Festival. This ongoing series features 10-minute plays of heightened language and classical themes by today's hottest writers, including commissions by established playwrights such as John Guare, David Ives, ReGina Taylor, and Anne Washburn, and winning entries by writers such as Mike Anderson, Sam Lahne, Lynn Rosen, and Jen Silverman--all chosen from a competition that receives nearly 300 submissions each year. In the hands of great playwrights, the 10-minute play is a highly entertaining dramatic form.

Red Bull Theater, hailed as "the city's gutsiest classical theater" by Time Out New York, is the not-profit Off-Broadway theater company specializing in plays of heightened language. With the Jacobean plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as its cornerstone, Red Bull Theater embraces the imagination of theatergoers through intimate, imaginative productions of great classic stories from all eras and cultures.

Acclaimed as "a dynamic producer of classic plays" by The New York Times, Red Bull Theater has previously staged productions of Pericles, The Revenger's Tragedy, Edward the Second, Women Beware Women, The Duchess of Malfi, The Witch of Edmonton, The Maids, The Dance of Death, Loot, The Mystery of Irma Vep, Volpone, and last season's hit production of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore. The company's work has been hailed as "the most exciting classical theater in New York" (Time Out New York), "Dynamite!" (The New York Times), "Triumphant" (Associated Press), and "Proof that classical theater can still be surprising after hundreds of years" (Variety).

Red Bull Theater's work has been recognized with multiple Callaway, Drama League, Lucille Lortel, and OBIE Award nominations and Awards. The company has staged over 125 readings through its ongoing OBIE Award-winning Revelation Readings, named by the Village Voice "Best Play Reading Series," and has developed new plays of heightened language and classical adaptations through its Cockpit and In-the-Raw workshop series. Red Bull Theater reaches out to NYC students of all ages through Direct Address education programs teaching Shakespeare in middle schools and offering student matinees. Post-play Bull Session discussions with scholars following selected Sunday matinees and Readings are free and open to the public.

Red Bull Theater offers Master Classes, Classical Acting Intensives and Workshops throughout the year. Taught by top working professionals including Kathleen Chalfant, John Douglas Thompson, Olympia Dukakis, Heidi Griffiths, and Patrick Page, Red Bull Theater's intensives and workshops cover a variety of disciplines, including auditioning, text, voice, movement, clowning, stage combat, and acting Shakespeare. Classes are open to adults at all levels of training or experience. They range from one to six days with limited class sizes to allow one-on-one attention. You can enroll in any combination of classes, or take the whole series for a year-long training experience. Visit www.redbulltheater.com for complete details.

To purchase tickets or for more information, visit www.redbulltheater.com or call (212) 352-3101.

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