The Common Tongue Announces Casting for Connect Five

The Common Tongue announces casting for CONNECT FIVE, an evening of one-act plays that unites new writers with established playwrights. Featuring world premieres by award winning writers Wendy MacLeod and Lucy Thurber and new plays by emerging playwrights Danny Mitarotondo and Bronwen Prosser.

CONNECT FIVE will feature Lila Dupree, Sarah Kauffman, Kathleen Littlefield, Blaze Mancillas, Heather Oakley, Michael Pantozzi, and Bronwen Prosser.

The Common TONGUE is an ensemble-based theater company that aims to tell simple and truthful stories. By investigating the playwright's power, collaborating across generations, and uniting diverse groups within the theatre community, TCT explores our generation's search for place, purpose, and meaning.

"The Common Tongue theatre company is a highly dedicated and accomplished group which is making a provocative and healthy impact on American theatre. They should be highly encouraged." Pulitzer Prize Winning Playwright, Edward Albee

LAST NIGHT
Written by Wendy MacLeod
Directed by Karen Kohlhaas
Featuring Sarah Kauffman & Michael Pantozzi
Juliet tries to do a little something extra in the bedroom for her boyfriend but the morning after finds him full of some ungrateful suspicions.

YOUNG
Written by Lucy Thurber
Directed by Shannon Fillion
Featuring Lila Dupree, Sarah Kauffman, Kathleen Littlefield, & Michael Pantozzi
Ava just can't seem to stop hurting the women in her life. Can they forgive her one last time?

THE ROOM AND A RICHARD
Written by Danny Mitarotondo
Directed by Mo Zhou
Featuring Blaze Mancillas & Heather Oakley
Strangers Cynthia and Alex, having an ordinary New York exchange over an apartment, suddenly sink into an extraordinary interchange of loss, love, and memory.

THE MAKE-OUT QUEEN
Written & Performed by Bronwen Prosser
Directed by Kathryn Walsh
A young woman's fierce and spastic quest for magic through the revolutionary art of kissing.

The production, presented by The Common Tongue, will play a limited engagement at The Ars Nova Building (511 West 54th Street between 10th & 11th Avenue), January 5-16 at 8pm with additional performances January 8-9 & 15-16 at 2pm. Tickets ($18/$15 students & seniors) are available online at www.tctnyc.org or by calling Ovation Tix at 1-866-811-4111. Please note that this production is not affiliated with Ars Nova or any of its 2011 programming.

SHANNON FILLION (Director, Young) is a New York based director/producer whose work includes Danny Mitarotando's What the Sparrow Said (Theater for the New City), Three Sisters (Schapiro Theater), Homeward Bound and Maggie Misplaced (Green Light Productions), Time Et. Al (Fringe NYC), The High Cost of Living (Prospect Theater's Dark Nights Series), Better This Way (Fringe NYC), Yehuda Duenyas's One Million Forgotten Moments, The Turtle Tattoo (MITF), Monkey Study (6B Garden), and Hamlet (Austin Arts Center). Shannon studied with director Brigid Panet at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, with Tina Packer at Shakespeare & Company, and is a graduate of both Trinity College and the Trinity/LaMama program. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab and has worked on staff at New York Theatre Workshop since 2006. She is currently studying for her MFA in Theatre Directing with Anne Bogart and Brian Kulick at Columbia University.

Karen Kohlhaas (Director, Last Night) is a director and founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company. Recent/upcoming: The Collection and A Kind of Alaska by Harold Pinter for Atlantic's 25th Anniversary season and Carnival Round the Central Figure by Diana Amsterdam at Interborough Repertory Theatre. Other credits include the world premiere of Annie Baker's Body Awareness (Atlantic); 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, starring Judy Gold, by Kate Moira Ryan with Ms. Gold, for the Montreal Comedy Festival, New York's Ars Nova, Off-Broadway and national tour. Also, At Sea by Clare Bayley for Cambridge, U.K.'s Menagerie Theatre; Pinter's The Hothouse (Atlantic), Keith Reddin's Synergy (Alley Theatre) and Frame 312 (Atlantic); David Mamet's Boston Marriage (Public Theater) and The Water Engine (Atlantic); Kate Moira Ryan's OTMA (Atlantic); An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein in New York (Atlantic) and Sydney (Practical Theatre Co.), and works by writers including Hilary Bell, Wendy McLeod, Joe Penhall, Jerome Hairston for Naked Angels, New Dramatists, Atlantic, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Culture Project and more. Her short films include The Palace of the End and If You See Something, Say Something with Taylor Mac, and the award winning short documentary The Babies Got the Blues with Rachel Hamilton, and they have been featured at the Silverlake Film Festival, The Galway Film Fleadh, the Tupelo and Crossroads Film Festivals.

KATHRYN WALSH (Director, The Make-Out Queen) has directed The Make-Out Queen twice previously: in New York at Tongue in Cheek Theatre this spring and in Woods Hole, MA this summer. Recent directing credits include Island of Slaves with Boston's Orfeo Group (Eliott Norton nomination for Outstanding Design) and the Midwest premiere of David Harrower's Kill the Old Torture Their Young at Steep Theatre in Chicago. Kathryn recently completed her coursework towards an MFA in Directing at Northwestern University, and is currently writing her thesis. At Northwestern, she directed Tony Kushner's The Illusion, Lanford Wilson's Burn This and Tom Stoppard's Travesties. In Chicago, she has assisted Anna D. Shapiro and Jessica Thebus on Our Town (Lookingglass), as well as assisted Anna D. Shapiro on the world premiere of August: Osage County, and Jessica Thebus on Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone and Laura Eason's When the Messenger is Hot (Steppenwolf). She has studied and worked at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, and received her B.A. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University.

MO ZHOU (Director, The Room and A Richard) is an MFA directing student at Columbia University. Originally from China, her work has been seen around the U.S, Singapore, Japan and China. Mo is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, Williamstown Workshop Directing Corps and the Society of Stage Director's and Choreographers. She is a graduate of Bowdoin College.

 

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