Harlem Stage Presents LEAVE IT ON THE FLOOR July 25

Leave it on the Floor tells the story of Brad, our hero, who is thrown out of his dysfunctional home by his mother, Deondra. He steals his mother's car and travels into Los Angeles where, through a chance encounter, Brad, a little like Alice in Wonderland, stumbles into a noisy raucous, chaotic event and meets the ragtag members of the struggling House of Eminence. Initially only looking for a place to sleep(and perhaps someone to sleep with), Brad ends up engaging with the colorful members of the house led by the indomitable house mother Queen Latina, herself an aging ball-legend and the fierce protectrice of her family. Laughter, tears, sex sirens, and butch queens up in pumps ensue and remarkably, Brad ends up finding an extraordinary home and loving, caring family in this, the strangest of places.

Harlem Stage ON SCREEN
LEAVE IT ON THE FLOOR
Presented in Partnership with NEWFEST
Mon, Jul 25 • The Gatehouse

6:30 pm - Reception for Ticketholders
7:30 pm - Film

Filmmaker:

Sheldon Larry (Producer/Director) has a distinguished career in film, television and the theater. Equally at home in action, drama and comedy, he has directed and/or produced more than 25 films for cinema, network and cable and has helmed many episodes of various television series. He learned his craft in Britain with more than 300 credits with the British Broadcasting Corporation including work on Monty Python's Flying Circus and film by Tom Stoppard, Sam Shepherd and E.A. Whitehead. He won a National Endowment Award for his work with dance on film and moved to New York City where for the next 10 years, he worked off-Broadway as a theater director as well.

He spent three summers at the National Playwrights Conference where he met and subsequently worked with many of the best American dramatists including Wendy Wasserstein, Peter Parnell and Israel Horovitz. His numerous theater credits include "Sorrows of Stephen," "Sunday Runners In the Rain," "Curse of the Starving Class" and "Romance Languages." He won an Obie for his production of "Forty-Deuce," worked with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy on "Many Faces of Love," and directed Blythe Danner and David Hyde Pierce in Candida. Among his favorite films are An American Daughter with Christine Lahti (which received a Golden Globe nomination); Split Images, a film adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel; The First Circle, an adaptation of the novel by Alexander Solzhenityn with Christopher Plummer and F. Murray Abraham; At The End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story (Gemini Award); Long Shadows (International Emmy), and Color of Love with the sublime Gena Rowlands (Emmy nominated). ?He teaches at USC in the School for Cinematic Arts and lives between Los Angeles and New York with his twin seventeen-year-old daughters. Leave It on the Floor is a passion project that began in the director's head 18 years ago when he first saw Paris Is Burning, the documentary which first shone the light on the culture. He has been collaborating on the project with Glenn Gaylord, the screenwriter, for the last four years.