Performance Space 122’s COIL Festival Extends UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW, MISSION DRIFT, NEWYORKLAND Through 2/4

Performance Space 122 is pleased to announce that three popular theater works from the contemporary performance festival COIL will extend. Young Jean Lee's Untitled Feminist Show, the TEAM's Mission Drift, and Temporary Distortion's Newyorkland will now run thru February 4, 2012. Additional production information can be found below and online at ps122.org.

Tickets for the newly announced dates will go on sale to the general public on January 15, 2012. All tickets may be purchased online at ps122.org, via phone at 212-352-3101, and in person at the box office at Performance Space 122 (150 1st Avenue) except where otherwise noted. Single ticket prices vary per event.

Untitled Feminist Show (New York Premiere)
Young Jean Lee's Theater Company (NY)
Co-presented with Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of BAC Presents Series

Conceived and directed by Young Jean Lee
Featuring Becca Blackwell, World Famous *BOB*, Amelia Zirin-Brown (aka Lady Rizo), Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle and Regina Rocke
Choreography by the Company in collaboration with Faye Driscoll
Associate Director: Morgan Gould

Baryshnikov Arts Center
Jerome Robbins Theater (450 W 37th St. NYC)
Jan 12 at 8:30pm; Jan 13–15, 18–21, 24–28 at 8pm (previously announced)
Jan 31, Feb 1–4 at 8pm (extension dates)
Tickets: $25 ($20 for students, seniors)

For Untitled Feminist Show, adventurous playwright/director Young Jean Lee put together a group of the most charismatic performers she could find (a cabaret star, a burlesque star, three dance-world stars, and a downtown theater star) to engage the audience in a celebration of human transformation and fluidity. Rather than making a political critique of sexist gender categories, Untitled Feminist Show invites us into an alternate reality in which such categories don't exist. Using a collage of music, dance, and nearly-wordless performance, the performers take the audience on an exhilarating and disorienting journey through an array of unexpected possibilities, inspiring us to forget about what we think we are and imagine what we could be.

Untitled Feminist Show is conceived and directed by Young Jean Lee; Choreography by Faye Driscoll, Morgan Gould, and Young Jean Lee in collaboration with the performers (Lee emphasizes the collaborative nature-women working together-of the choreography); Director of choreography Faye Driscoll. It is performed by: Becca Blackwell, World Famous *BOB*, Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle, Regina Rocke and Amelia Zirin-Brown (aka Lady Rizo). Morgan Gould is the show's Associate Director.

Young Jean Lee (Artistic Director) is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and OBIE Award winner, and was named by American Theatre magazine one of the 25 artists who will shape the American theater over the next 25 years. Since 2002, she has directed her plays at Soho Rep (LEAR; THE APPEAL), The Kitchen (THE SHIPMENT), The Public Theater (CHURCH), Performance Space 122 (CHURCH; PULLMAN, WA), HERE Arts Center (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals); and performed in her play WE'RE GONNA DIE (with band Future Wife) at Joe's Pub. She and her company have been the recipients of numerous grants and her work has been invited to tour to venues in over 30 cities around the world. Recent awards include a 2010 fellowship in playwriting from NYFA, and a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mission Drift (US Premiere)
the TEAM (NY)

The Connelly Theater (220 E 4th St. NYC)
Jan 8, 11am; Jan 9–10, 12–14, 17–21, 24–28 at 8pm; Jan 15, 22, 29 at 5pm; Jan 28, 2pm (previously announced)
Jan 31, Feb 1–4 at 8pm (extension dates)
Tickets: $25 ($20 for students, seniors)

Mission Drift is a pioneering journey east and west through time and space in pursuit of the soul of American capitalism. This epic musical explores economic collapse and the potential for recovery through two colliding stories, one mystical and one modern. The saga includes two immortal Dutch teenagers who travel west from 1624 Amsterdam to present-day Las Vegas, where we meet a recently laid-off Vegas cocktail waitress and a Native American cowboy whose property has just been repossessed by the city. The hopes of these four characters intertwine, as the dream of the eternal American frontier becomes a crumbing myth that has gone bankrupt. Over it all reigns Miss Atomic, played by Mission Drift composer Heather Christian (2011 Off-Off-Broadway Innovator to Watch, Time Out New York), a seductive narrator inspired by the 1950s Vegas beauty pageants that celebrated the testing of atomic bombs.

Combining Elvis gyrations, lizard ballet, atomic blasts, and original music, Mission Drift marks the TEAM's first performances in New York since their critically acclaimed work Architecting, a co-production between PS122 and The National Theatre of Scotland, in 2009. A political and urgent work about creation and destruction, Mission Drift features a score that fuses Vegas glitz with Western ballads and Southern Gospel. "What a blast," declares Lyn Gardner in The Guardian, "Economics has never been more playfully dissected… the company fulfills all their much-hyped promise in this gorgeous, gaudy musical."

Renowned for fusing American history, myth, and contemporary stories, the TEAM, under the direction of Obie award-winner Rachel Chavkin (Three Pianos), conceived of Mission Drift before the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Yet in this timely work, the company wrestles with questions that are at the forefront of our current economic and political climate: How did we arrive at this financial crisis and how do we recover as individuals and as a country?

Newyorkland (New York Premiere)
Temporary Distortion (NY)

Baryshnikov Arts Center
Howard Gilman Performance Space (450 West 37th St. NYC)
Jan 12 at 7pm; Jan 13, 14, 17–21, 24–28 at 7:30pm; Jan 15 at 6pm (previously announced)
Jan 31, Feb 1–4 at 8pm (extension dates)
Tickets: $20 ($15 for students, seniors)

Both terrifying and touchingly vulnerable, Newyorkland sheds a dark light on the secretive, fraternal society that is the NYPD and the thin line that officers must walk between righteousness and corruption. The work combines representations of cops from TV and film with testimonials from police officers in director Kenneth Collins immediate family. In merging this private history with fiction, Collins has set out to create one of his most personal works to date. The Seattle Times writes, "Newyorkland is a fascinating window into a cop's often isolating experiences."

Staged in one of the company's signature box-like structures, Newyorkland fuses live performance and film to create a claustrophobic, yet meditative work. The box-like installation serves as a framework for the both the performers' restrained acting style and as a canvas for the arresting images of video designer William Cusick, who blends cinéma vérité, documentary realism and pure fiction. "Seamless and gorgeous," writes Seattle's The Stranger, "a dreamy, poetic, abstracted, and sometimes scary meditation on what it's like to live behind a badge."

Newyorkland features direction and set and lighting design by Kenneth Collins, video design and direction by William Cusick, music and sound by John Sully, and costumes by TaraFawn Marek. The stage cast includes Nick Bixby, Daniel Brown, Al Di Martino and Brian Greer. Prior to PS122, Newyorkland was presented at Theatre Junction (Calgary, Canada) and On the Boards (Seattle, Washington).

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