SoHo Rep to Offer FEED Programming for DEATH OF WALT DISNEY

Soho Rep's FEED program is designed to enrich audiences' and artists' experience of Soho Rep's plays through live events, print publications and online content. Through the program's post-performance series, Soho Rep willoffera number of events - artist dialogues, presentations, etc - during the world premiere of Lucas Hnath's play A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, directed by Sarah Benson (April 30 - May 26).

Hnath's adrenaline-charged odyssey centers around the reading of a screenplay he imagines Walt Disney, the man who forever changed the American Dream, to have written about his last days on earth. The world premiere of the play features Larry Pine (The Royal Family, The Seagull, Wes Anderson's films and "House of Cards") stars as Walt Disney with Amanda Quaid (C-ck, Luck of the Irish) as Daughter, Brian Sgambati (Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino, The Coasts of Utopia) as Ron Miller, and Frank Wood (Clybourne Park, Angels in America) as Roy Disney. Performances will take place Tuesdays through Sundays at 7:30 P.M., and Saturdays at 3:00 P.M. Tickets are on sale now at www.sohorep.org or 212.352.3101. Soho Rep is located at 46 Walker St.

These FEED events will expand upon A Public Reading...,looking at the play from cinematic to theatrical to historical points of view:

After the May 4 matinee, Soho Rep will present "A Conversation with Playwright Lucas Hnath & Director Sarah Benson," in which the playwright and the director will speak about the production, moderated by Soho Rep's Literary & Humanities Manager, Raphael Martin.

On May 9, Soho Rep will present "Screenwriting and History." Kent Jones, Director of Programming for the New York Film Festival, will muse on history and film, asking, "How have movies taken famous and important real-life people and turned them into stories for the silver screen?"

The May 11 matinee will be followed by "A Look Into Celebration, Florida," in which noted professor Andrew Ross (Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU) will delve into his year of living in the planned Disney community Celebration, FL. Professor Ross will also explore the town of Celebration and how it relates to Disney's original vision for the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow (EPCOT).

On May 15, the performance will be followed by "The Museum of the Moving Image and Lucas Hnath," featuring David Schwartz, Chief Curator at The Museum of the Moving Image, in conversation with Hnath. The pair will discuss a wide-ranging series of topics: movies, film history, topics in Disney Studies and more.

FEED collaborates with the Soho bookseller McNally Jackson for the first time for "FEED @ McNally Jackson Bookshop: History and Fiction" on May 22. Working with in-store drama and fiction departments, FEED and McNally Jackson will bring together a diverse group of writers who have written about historical characters in their fiction. Hnath's DISNEY playtext will be available for purchase. The event starts at 7:00 P.M. and will take place at McNally Jackson Books (52 Prince St, NYC). Guests are to be announced.

All events are free, open to the public and take place directly following a performance unless otherwise noted. For updates and more information, go to sohorep.org/feedme.

Lucas Hnath's recent plays include A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, Red Speedo, Hillary and Clinton, Sake Tasting with a Séance to Follow, The Courtship of Anna Nicole Smith, Odile's Ordeal, Tonguetied, and Three Attempts at Corrective Eye Surgery. He has been a resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011. Most recently his play Death Tax premiered in the 36th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. Hnath is a two-time winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant for his feature-length screenplays, The Painting, the Machine, and the Apple and Still Life. He is also a recipient of an EST/Sloan Project commission for Isaac's Eye.

Most recently, his play Death Tax premiered in the 36th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2012. In addition, he is currently working on two commissions for Actors Theatre of Louisville, including a collaboration with Rinne Groff and Anne Washburn called Sleep Rock Thy Brain, which will premiere at the Humana Festival in 2013.

Sarah Benson is the Artistic Director of Soho Rep (since 2007). For Soho Rep, she has directed David Adjmi's site-specific Elective Affinities with Zoe Caldwell; Sarah Kane's Blasted (OBIE Award, Drama Desk nomination); Gregory Moss' Orange, Hat & Grace. Other recent credits include: Futurity a musical by The Lisps (A.R.T. & Walker Arts Center), Polly Stenham's That Face (MTC), Gregory Moss' House of Gold (Woolly Mammoth) and Sophocles' Ajax (A.R.T.). Upcoming projects include Basetrack (2014, BAM's Next Wave Festival), The Lisps' Futurity in New York and Richard Maxwell's Samara.

Kent Jones' writing on film has been published throughout the world in numerous magazines, newspapers, catalogues, websites and journals. In 2007 a collection of his writings, Physical Evidence, was published by Wesleyan University Press, and he recently edited the first English-language volume of writings on Olivier Assayas, published by Filmmuseum Synema Publikationem. He is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. Jones has collaborated for many years on documentaries with Martin Scorsese, beginning with My Voyage to Italy (2001) on which he served as co-writer. He and Scorsese co-wrote and co-directed A Letter to Elia (2010), an Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning film about the director Elia Kazan. Scorsese was the producer and narrator of Jones' 2007 documentary about Val Lewton, The Man in The Shadows.

Jones began in programming with Bruce Goldstein at Film Forum, and served as the American representative for the Rotterdam International Film Festival from 1996 to 1998. From 1998 to 2009, he was Associate Director of Programming at The Film Society of Lincoln Center, and from 2002 to 2009 he served on the New York Film Festival selection committee. He has also served on juries at film festivals around the world, including Rotterdam, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Venice and Cannes. In 2009, he was named Executive Director of The World Cinema Foundation.

Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. He is the author of twelve books, including Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, Fast Boat to China--Lessons from Shanghai, Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town. He has also edited six collections, including No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers, Anti-Americanism, and The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace. His most recent book is Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City. Professor Ross is a contributor to the Nation, the Village Voice, and Artforum.

David Schwartz joined the Museum of the Moving Image in 1985. He is responsible for curating, organizing, and overseeing the Museum's wide-ranging film and video programs, which include independent and Hollywood films from the silent era to the present, experimental films, documentaries, animation, and other forms of the moving image. He is Editor-at-Large of Moving Image Source, the Museum's online publication. Schwartz is also a Visiting Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies at Purchase College, and the host of the Westchester Cinema Club. Schwartz was the Director of Programming for the 1998 Hamptons International Film Festival. He has written numerous freelance articles about film for publications including The Washington Post and Newsday, and he has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, and the Independent Television Service. Prior to joining the Museum, Schwartz was a programmer at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, New York. He received a B.F.A. from the Film Program at SUNY Purchase.

Audience engagement is a core component of Soho Rep's work. FEED, the theater's Literary and Humanities Program, created by Literary & Humanities Manager Raphael Martin, is a hub for all ancillary activities surrounding Soho Rep's programming. An eclectic series of live events, publishing and on-line content, FEED aims to enrich the artist/audience experience beyond people simply watching the plays we produce. FEED invites artists and audiences further into the process of theater making in an effort to expand the vocabulary and context around Contemporary Theatre. Soho Rep is a very big small theatre. We are committed to developing, and producing pioneering Contemporary Theatre with the highest artistic standards possible. For more information, go tosohorep.org/feedme.

Founded in 1975, and in its theater on Walker Street since 1991, Soho Rep has built an outstanding reputation for being at the forefront of new and innovative theatre, serving as a vital center for Contemporary Theatre artists.

Soho Rep is dedicated to cultivating and producing visionary, uncompromising, and exuberant new plays. They perform to one of the youngest adult audiences in New York City, with over three-quarters aged 18-40.

Critics continue to herald Soho Rep as a go-to theatre destination for new and original works. New York Magazine has said, "this indispensable theater offers more excitement per chair than any space in town," Time Out New York says, "Soho Rep is the best theater in NYC (official)," Variety exclaims, "[Soho Rep] has claimed an increasingly vital spot...the venue has suddenly become one to watch for Manhattan theatergoers starved for new work," and The New York Times declares Soho Rep to be "The downtown powerhouse...regularly outclasses the work done on many of the city's larger stages."

Over the last decade, Soho Rep productions have garnered 13 OBIE Awards; six Drama Desk nominations, Two Kesselring Awards for Melissa James Gibson and Mark Schultz and The New York Times Outstanding Playwriting Award for Dan LeFranc's Sixty Miles To Silverlake. In recent years, Soho Rep has presented plays by established and emerging theatre artists such as Annie Baker, Richard Maxwell, Sarah Kane, Daniel Alexander Jones, Debbie Tucker Green, Mac Wellman, Young Jean Lee and Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

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