Theater Breaking Through Barriers to Present VIRTUAL PLAYMAKERS' INTENSTIVE

Theater Breaking Through Barriers today announced their first-ever Virtual Playmakers' Intensive. This unique online workshop will feature the world premiere of seven original works, created by and for TBTB artists and written exclusively to be performed on the Zoom conferencing platform.

This intensive will feature the work of 28 artists, including writers Fareeda Ahmed, Kathryn Grant, Stuart Green, Nico Grelli, Anita Hollander, Sofya Levitsky-Weiss, and Jeff Tabnick and directors Kristin Heckler, Ann Marie Morelli, Everett Quinton, Richard Rose and TBTB Artistic Director Nicholas Viselli. The cast will include Kiera Allen, Scott Barton, Alyssa H. Chase, Sofya Cheyenne, Samantha Debicki, Melissa Jennifer Gonzalez, Stuart Green, David Harrell, Anita Hollander, Bree Klauser, Richard Lear, J. Martin McDonough, Lawrence Merritt, Ann Marie Morelli, Melanie Portsche, Everett Quinton, Pearl Rhein, Pamela Sabaugh, Jack Sims, and Nick Walther.

Appropriately titled, VPI:2020 - Pandem-mania! will take place from Monday, May 25 through May 31. This workshop will be streamed on Facebook and YouTube Live with all performances beginning at 7:30 PM (EDT). Unlike TBTB's usual Intensive Workshops, where all plays are performed in one seating, we will be featuring one, short play each evening during the week.

Every year since 2016, TBTB has hosted a Playmakers' Intensive in which actors, directors, and writers gather together for one week to create new short plays, which are given a public viewing at the end of the week. TBTB would pick shows from past Intensives and transform them into polished work. Normally, the Intensives take place in the Fall and the Playmakers' Redux in the early Spring.

"In spite of all that our New York theater community continues to endure in the face of this pandemic, it is so inspiring to see how we are all discovering new ways to keep our art vibrant and flourishing. TBTB has chosen to adapt one of its most popular live programs to our most readily available medium. It will be a great experiment and we are very excited about sharing it with our audiences. We hope you'll join us for what promises to be a very exciting week of original short plays, written expressly to be performed on the ZOOM platform for an online audience, streamed live and in real time," said Viselli.

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