Brave New World Rep's NEW WORKS Series to Continue with #THEREVOLUTION, 5/5

Brave New World Rep announces the latest in its NEW WORKS series featuring Brooklyn playwrights, #therevolution by Kristoffer Diaz. The production, directed by Liesl Tommy, will play May 5th, 2014 at 7 p.m. at 61 Local, 61 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, NY (F/G to Bergen Street). Admission for all events is free.

#therevolution features Tala Ashe, Zainab Jah, Hana Moon, and Al-nisa Petty.

The audience is invited to join the company at 61 Local, a public house serving local fare-beer, wine, coffee and food, and stay for conversation with the artists.

About #therevolution: Sometimes life is too much to take. Sometimes it makes you do dumb things. Sometimes that dumb thing is killing someone. Sometimes when you kill someone, an army rises up in your name. Then you've got to deal with that. #therevolution is an extra dark comedy about two young women who accidentally take over the world and devote themselves to fixing it. Or just enjoying the fame. Either of those.

In 2013 Brave New World Rep launched NEW WORKS, a play initiative designed to help the company deepen its commitment to playwrights in our borough. Throughout the year, a staged reading series will showcase four Brooklyn writers' work presented in diverse, environmentally-specific locations throughout Brooklyn.

Curated and produced by Shannon Sindelar, producing artistic director of Brave New World Rep. Advisor to the program: David Lindsay-Abaire.

Kristoffer Diaz is a playwright and educator living and working in Brooklyn. Full-length titles include The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, Welcome to Arroyo's, The Upstairs Concierge, and The Unfortunates. Awards: 2011 New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award; finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; winner, 2011 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play; winner, 2011 OBIE Award, Best New American Play; and the inaugural Gail Merrifield Papp Fellowship from The Public Theater (2011). His work has been produced, commissioned, and developed at The Public Theater, Dallas Theater Center, Geffen Playhouse, Center Theatre Group, The Goodman, Second Stage, Victory Gardens, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Theater Company, The Atlantic, InterAct, Mixed Blood, The Orchard Project, Hip-Hop Theater Festival, The Lark, Summer Play Festival, Donmar Warehouse, and South Coast Repertory, among many others. Kristoffer holds a BA from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, an MFA from NYU's Department of Dramatic Writing, and an MFA from Brooklyn College's Performing Arts Management program.

Liesl Tommy is an award-winning director whose world premieres include Party People by Universes at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The White Man-A Complex Declaration of Love by Joan Rang with DanskDansk Theatre in Denmark, Peggy Picket Sees the Face of God by Roland Schimmelpfennig at the Luminato Festival/Canadian Stage Toronto, Eclipsed by Danai Gurira at Yale Repertory Theatre and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, The Good Negro by Tracey Scott Wilson at The Public Theater and Dallas Theater Center, A History of Light by Eisa Davis at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Angela's Mixtape by Eisa Davis at Synchronicity Performance Group, New Georges, and Bus and Family Ties at the Play Company for the Romania Kiss Me! Festival. She is the Associate Director at Berkeley Rep. Liesl's other credits include California Shakespeare Theater, Huntington Theatre Company, Center Stage in Baltimore, Sundance East Africa, Manda Island, Kenya, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, and Huntington Theatre Company, among others. She serves as the program associate at Sundance Institute Theatre Program, focusing on its activities in East Africa, and she was recently made an artist trustee with the Sundance Institute's board of trustees. Liesl was awarded the inaugural Susan Stroman Directing Award from the Vineyard Theatre, the NEA/TCG Directors Grant, and the New York Theatre Workshop Casting/Directing Fellowship. She is a native of Cape Town, South Africa.

About Brave New World Repertory Theatre: Over the past ten years in Brooklyn, Brave New World Rep has carved out a site-specific niche presenting reenvisioned classics and works by Brooklyn playwrights. Recent work includes free performances of Elmer Rice's Street Scene, in which the company closed off a street in Park Slope and used a tenement building and the adjacent street as the stage, and Orson Welles' Moby Dick-Rehearsed, presented on a barge in Red Hook. This year the company kicked off NEW WORKS, a new play initiative designed to deepen its relationship with Brooklyn writers (including this year Kristoffer Diaz, Erin Courtney, Gary Winter and Mark Sitko).

The company earned its reputation of delivering unexpectedly immersive works to communities all around Brooklyn with its 2005 production of To Kill a Mockingbird, presented on the front porches and sidewalks of a tree-lined Ditmas Park street. Other work includes On The Waterfront on a Brooklyn barge that toured the waterfronts of New York Bay, The Tempest on the beach and boardwalk in Coney Island, and The Crucible by lantern light for 2 weeks at The Old Stone House in Park Slope. Based in Brooklyn, Brave New World Repertory has been a featured favorite of Celebrate Brooklyn at the Prospect Park band shell, presenting acclaimed productions of Fahrenheit 451, The Great White Hope and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, based on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. For more information, visit www.bravenewworldrep.org.

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