AFTER THE CHAIRS Plays 2013 Fresh Fruit Festival, Now thru 7/14

Award-winning playwright David Koteles' play After the Chairs, directed by Jason Jacobs is an official selection of the 2013 All Out Arts, Inc.'s Fresh Fruit Festival, and will be presented today, July 10th - 14th at The Wild Project (195 E. 3rd Street). Tickets are $18 and can be purchased by visiting www.freshfruitfestival.com.

Presented by Tucker Theatricals and All Out Arts, Inc., After the Chairs marks the latest collaboration between playwright David Koteles and director Jason Jacobs, whose last project My First Lady sold out at the Founding Fathers Festival this past January. Koteles and Jacobs, who also brought the award-winning comedy Bald Diva! The Ionesco Parody Your Mother Warned You About to the very first Fresh Fruit Festival 10 years ago, are returning with another Ionesco-inspired play, After the Chairs.

Inspired by the Eugene Ionesco absurdist tale, Koteles' After the Chairs tells the story of two men, Marc and Richard, alone in a quiet hospital room waiting for what happens next. A visit from friends? The telling of stories? Results from a doctor? A big performance? End of life as they know it? It is a play about family, marriage in sickness and in health, death, drag, drugs and (like the Ionesco play) many, many, many chairs.

DAVID KOTELES (Writer) has had plays produced on the east and west coasts, including his award-winning, GLAAD-nominated comedy Bald Diva! The Ionesco Parody Your Mother Warned You About. Bald Diva! was later published in NYTE's anthology Playing with Canons: Explosive New Works from Great Literature by America's Indie Playwrights. It was also listed on numerous end-of-the-year ("Best of the Season") lists for best play of 2004.

David has enjoyed numerous New York productions, workshops and readings of his work at such places as Ensemble Studio Theatre, Manhattan Class Company, The Rattlestick, Alice's Fourth Floor, Primary Stages, The Perry Street Playhouse, Manhattan Theatre Source, Clemente Soto Velez, the Fresh Fruit Festival, the Homogenius Festival, Cherry Picking, the Red Room, and the Westbank Café.

He adapted the book "You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up!" for the stage for producer Orin Wolf, and that play has been on national tour since October 2011. His most recent play, My First Lady, premiered at the Metropolitan Playhouse this past January and was called a "brilliant and delicious satire" by Martin Denton of nytheatre.com.

A graduate of the Columbia University School of the Arts, David has studied playwriting with Theresa Rebeck, Anne Bogart, Eduardo Machado, Leslie Ayvazian, Frank Pugliese, and Kelly Stuart. He was also honored with the Richard Rodgers Scholarship and a Howard Stein Fellowship while at Columbia. David graduated summa cum laude from Queens College, where he was made Phi Beta Kappa and earned the John Golden Award for Playwriting.

He has also written several (as of yet unproduced) film scripts and TV pilots, and David was a finalist for the Writer's Lab at the Sundance Film Festival. He is a staff writer on the web series sitcom, Ernie's Girls. He is current writing a new play for the New York-based theatre company One-Eighth.

JASON JACOBS (Director) New York-based theatre director Jason Jacobs creates imaginative, thought-provoking, and moving productions acclaimed for their powerful impact on audiences. He has been identified as a 2007 Person of the Year by NYTheatre.com for his outstanding contributions to the cultural landscape. His productions have received two GLAAD Media Award nominations and critical praise from The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, and TheatreMania.com.

Jason's work probes a broad range of interests with a focus on adaptations of classic texts and historic material. His original play Another Horatio Alger Story explores Alger's the 19th century rags-to-riches stories from a contemporary perspective. He co-created Bald Diva!, a queer twist on Eugene Ionesco'sThe Bald Soprano, blending the Theatre of the Absurd style with contemporary gay theatre to create a potent theatrical cocktail. In Burlington Vermont, he initiated an adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya to address the specific concerns of the rural Vermont community. He also directs bold interpretations of classic texts, such Oliver Twist, The Tempest, As You Like It, and The Cherry Orchard.

Jason is also passionate about working on new plays. He has created dynamic solo productions with Kathryn Blume, founder of the Lysistrata Project, and Jeremy Lawrence (Lavender Songs -- winner of a 2008 Backstage Bistro Award). He has also directed plays by Richard Sheinmel (Post Modern Living), Jason Schafer (i google myself) and David Koteles (The Trick and Bald Diva!). He loves opera and directed Center for Contemporary Opera's premiere production of Mario and the Magician.

With a strong commitment to teaching and working with young people, Jason is a teaching artist for Roundabout Theatre Company. He has taught at Williamstown Theatre Festival and worked as a guest artist at Long Island University/CW Post Campus, NYU Department of Dramatic Writing, Bay Shore High School, and Beacon High School in New York City. He co-founded The Theatre Askew Youth Performance Experience, which empowers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth in the NYC area to develop their unique theatrical voices, and directed TAYPE's first two initial productions.

Born and raised in Culver City, California, Jason received his undergraduate degree from Yale and his MFA from Columbia, under the tutelage of Anne Bogart, RoBert Woodruff, Brian Kulick, and Tina Landau. Additionally, he has been spotted on stage over the years in a range of roles the Grasshopper inJames and the Giant Peach, his own solo piece Poor Sport, and the enigmatic meterosexual "Tom the Assistant" in Polly Frost's episodic series Sex Scenes.

For more information: www.jason-jacobs.com I www.davidkoteles.com I www.freshfruitfestival.com.

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