St. Louis Actors' Studio's LaBUTE THEATRE FESTIVAL to Receive NY Premiere at 59E59 Theaters

59E59 Theaters will welcome the St. Louis Actors' Studio?with the NYC premiere of their acclaimed LaBUTE NEW THEATER FESTIVAL, an evening of one-act plays featuring new plays by Neil LaBute, Lexi Wolfe, Peter Grandbois & Nancy Bell, G.D. Kimble, JJ Strong, and John Doble. Directed by Milton Zoth and John Pierson, the LaBUTE NEW THEATER FESTIVAL begins performances on Wednesday, January 13 for a limited engagement through Sunday, February 7. Press opening is Sunday, January 17 at 7:30 PM. The performance schedule is Tuesday - Thursday at 7:30 PM; Friday at 8:30 PM; Saturday at 2:30 PM & 8:30 PM; and Sunday at 3:30 PM & 7:30 PM. Performances are at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues). Tickets are $30 ($21 for 59E59 Members). To purchase tickets, call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 or go to www.59e59.org.

An evening of six one-act plays that received their world premiers at past LaBute New Theater Festivals, an annual festival of one-acts curated by St. Louis Actors' Studio. Two unlikely hearts collide at a London house party in STAND UP FOR ONESELF by Lexi Wolfe. A sexy social media hook up is at the heart of Nancy Bell and Peter Grandbois' PRESENT TENSE. TWO IRISHMEN ARE DIGGING A DITCH by G.D. Kimble is a joke with one hell of a punch line. JJ Strong's THE COMEBACK SPECIAL is a sweet Elvis comedy. A blind date goes horribly wrong in COFFEE HOUSE, GREENWICH VILLAGE by John Doble. And in Neil LaBute's devastating KANDAHAR, a soldier returns home after his tour of duty.

The cast features Mark Ryan Anderson, Justin Ivan Brown, Michael Hogan, Neil Magnuson, Alicia Smith, and Jenny Smith.

The design team includes Patrick Huber (set design), Jonathan Zelezniak (lighting design), and Carla Evans (costume design). The production stage manager is Seth Pyatt.

John Pierson(director/Kandahar, Stand Up For Oneself, Coffee House) has directed for HotHouse's Greenhouse Festival and is chair of the Theatre, Speech & Dance department at John Burroughs College Prep School, where his directing credits include One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Picasso at the Lapin Agile; 'night, Mother; The Little Prince; Proof; The Shadow Box; Crimes of the Heart; The Madwoman of Chaillot; A Midsummer Night's Dream; The Glass Menagerie; Middletown; and the world premiere of Intelligent Life. As an actor, he appeared at St. Louis Actors' Studio in The Late Henry Moss (Kevin Kline Award winner for Outstanding Supporting Actor); Back Of The Throat; Love Song; Closer (Kevin Kline Award nominee for Outstanding Actor); The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia; The Ride Down Mt. Morgan; Art; and Seminar. A proud Equity member, John has acted for many mid-west companies including Upstream, New Jewish Theatre, The Black Rep, Ozark Actors Theatre, Spotlight Theatre, Muddy Waters, Hothouse, Historyonics, The New Theatre, and Insight.

Milton Zoth (director/Present Tense, Two Irishmen..., The Comeback Special) recently directed the world premier of The Awakening and the New York premier of Day of the Dog. Milt served as the Artistic Director of Orthwein Theatre Company, worked with The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, MUNY 1st Stage, City Players, Hot City Theatre, The New Jewish Theatre, Arrow Rock Lyceum Theatre and then became the Associate Artistic Director of St. Louis Shakespeare Theatre. He then became the Artistic Director of St. Louis Actors' Studio. There Milt directed Greetings, Antigone, The Late Henry Moss, A Doll's House, 9 Parts of Desire, The Good Person Of Szechuan, Rock and Roll, The Sunshine Boys, Just Desserts, Killer Joe, Nuts, Day of the Dog (world premier), King Lear, Good, Pterodactyls and A Man For All Seasons. Milt was nominated for a Kevin Kline Award as "best director" for Metamorphoses, a St. Louis Theatre Circle award for Good and was awarded The Best Director by the River Front Times for Rock and Roll. Milt served as artistic director of St. Louis Actors' Studio from inception to 2014.

Neil LaBute (playwright, Kandahar) received his Master of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing from New York University and was the recipient of a literary fellowship to study at the Royal Court Theatre, London and also attended the Sundance Institute's Playwrights Lab. His films include: In the Company of Men (New York Critics' Circle Award for Best First Feature and the Filmmaker Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival), Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Shape of Things (a film adaptation of his play by the same title), The Wicker Man, Lakeview Terrace, Death at a Funeral, Some Velvet Morning and Dirty Weekend. LaBute's plays include: Bash: latter-day plays, The Shape of Things, The Mercy Seat, The Distance From Here, Autobahn, Fat Pig (Olivier Award Nominated for Best Comedy), Some Girl(s), This Is How It Goes, Wrecks, Filthy Talk For Troubled Times, In a Dark Dark House, Reasons To Be Pretty (Tony Award Nominated for Best Play), The Break of Noon, In a Forest Dark and Deep, Reasons To Be Happy, The Money Shot and The Way We Get By. He has also adapted Woyzeck, Dracula, Miss Julie and Antigone for the stage. For television he has written the series Full Circle,Ten X Ten and Billy & Billie for DirecTV. LaBute is also the author of Seconds of Pleasure, a collection of short fiction, which was published by Grove Atlantic.

Lexi Wolfe (playwright, Stand Up for Oneself) was born in Sheffield, and spent much of her young life between her hometown and Pakistan. She recently completed a Masters Course in Acting at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. She works with the theater company Flashlight Creative and is founder of Wild Wolfe Production. Her debut novel, Better Off Dead: The Story Of Rosa The Vampire Fledgling, was published in 2013.

G.D. Kimble (playwright, Two Irishmen Are Digging a Ditch) is best known as an actor, seen most recently in Naked Fish and The Tiger Cage with TheatreMasters (at the Public Theater), 365 Days/Plays with Engine 37 (at the Atlantic Theater), and Which Direction Home? with The Internationalists. He is a native of Louisiana, where he has performed or directed with Swine Palace, The New Orleans Shakespeare Festival, Marjorie Lyons Playhouse, Playmakers of Baton Rouge, and the Theatre of Ill-Repute. G.D. is also a founding member of both GreenDoor Productions and The Pass-The-Hat-Theatre, and served as artistic director of the latter. In 2011, he served as assistant director for the Broadway revival of Terence Rattigan's Man & Boy, directed by multiple BAFTA and Tony Award nominee Maria Aitken, and starring Frank Langella. He is the author of numerous plays, and his first full-length work, Megiddo opened to rave reviews at Manhattan Repertory Theatre in September 2009. He is also an adjunct faculty member of the American Conservatory Theater's Young Conservatory. G.D. is a graduate of the Shakespeare & Company Training Institute in Lenox, MA, holds a BA in theatre performance from Louisiana State University, and an MFA in acting from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, CA. He currently lives in NYC.

JJ Strong (playwright, The Comeback Special) is a Resident Playwright at Moving Arts Theatre in Los Angeles. Most recently, his plays have been produced at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, CA. His writing also regularly appears in LA Weekly and the Santa Monica Review. He lives with his wife and son in Los Angeles, where he teaches in the undergraduate writing program at the University of Southern California.

John Doble's (playwright, Coffee House, Greenwich Village) plays include Coffee House, Greenwich Village; A Serious Person (Belper Prize, Belper, UK);Tatyana and the Cable Man (Best Play, Midtown Short Play Festival, NYC); Reunion Run; To Protect the Poets; Blind Date; and The Mayor Who Would Be Sondheim. They've been performed in the NY International Fringe Festival and other venues in NYC as well as in Los Angeles, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and in the UK. His short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines.

Peter Grandbois (playwright, Present Tense) is the author of The Gravedigger (Chronicle Books, 2006), a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection, The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, (Spuyten Duyvil 2009), which was named one of the top five memoirs of 2009 by the Sacramento News and Review, the novel, Nahoonkara (Etruscan Press, 2011), winner of the Gold Medal in literary fiction in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards for 2011, and the forthcoming short story collection Domestic Disturbances (Subito Press 2013). His short fiction, plays, and essays have appeared in magazines such as: The
Kenyon Review, Boulevard, The Mississippi Review, Post Road, Gargoyle, The Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, The Potomac Review, and The Writer's Chronicle and been shortlisted for both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. He is a professor of creative writing and contemporary literature at Denison University in Ohio.

Nancy Bell's (playwright, Present Tense) play, The New World, a contemporary adaptation of The Tempest, was commissioned and produced by Shakespeare Festival St. Louis in April, 2012. It was nominated for a St. Louis Theatre Circle Award for Best New Play. Her play, Venus, was a finalist for the 2012 Next Generation Playwriting Prize. She has finished her third commission for Shakespeare Festival St. Louis produced last September. New York theater credits include work as an actor at Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Theatre Workshop, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Tribeca Lab and elsewhere. She has worked in regional theatres all over the country, including South Coast Repertory, Berkeley Repertory, Geffen Playhouse, Pasadena Playhouse, Hartford Stage Company, The Old Globe, Dallas Theatre Center, McCarter Theatre, Baltimore Center Stage, Cincinnati Playhouse, and ACT, among others. In St. Louis, she appeared in Macbeth, Clybourne Park (St. Louis Theatre Circle Best Actress Award 2012), and Soups, Stews and Casseroles: 1976, all at the Rep Theatre of St. Louis, Sylvia in End Days at the New Jewish Theatre, and Stevie in The Goat or Who is Sylvia at St. Louis Actors' Studio. Next spring she will appear at the Rep in a new Rebecca Gilman play, Soups, Stews and Casseroles: 1976. On television, she portrayed the role of Susan Bates on the long-running classic soap opera, The Guiding Light. Other television credits include Numbers, The Medium, Huff, The Bold and the Beautiful, Law and Order, Law and Order SVU, Star Trek Voyager, Chicago Hope, Mad About You, and Newsradio, among others. Nancy is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Saint Louis University, where she both directs and teaches acting, voice and speech.

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