WIDE AWAKE HEARTS to Receive NYC Premiere at 59E59 Theaters

59E59 Theaters will welcome the US debut of BirdLand Theatre with the NYC premiere of WIDE AWAKE HEARTS, written by Brendan Gall and directed by Stefan Dzeparoski. WIDE AWAKE HEARTS begins performances on Thursday, January 14 for a limited engagement through Sunday, February 7. Press opening is Thursday, January 21 at 7:15 PM. The performance schedule is Tuesday - Thursday at 7:15 PM; Friday at 8:15 PM; Saturday at 2:15 PM & 8:15 PM; and Sunday at 3:15 PM. Please note: there is an added performance on Sunday, January 17 at 7:15 PM. Performances are at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues). Tickets are $35 ($24.50 for 59E59 Members). To purchase tickets, call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 or go to www.59e59.org.

From the writer/producer of NBC's critically acclaimed "Blindspot" Brendan Gall (also a four-time Dora Award-nominee) comes a play about the complexities of relationships. Four friends - a writer, an actress, an actor and an editor - are pulled through an astonishingly strange, erotic landscape of love and infidelity while trying to make a movie about those very things.

WIDE AWAKE HEARTS marks the first New York production of the formerly Toronto-based BirdLand Theatre. Now headquartered in NYC, BirdLand is the winner of six Dora Awards (Canada's equivalent of the Tonys). Birdland Theatre has been praised as "a company that has produced some of the most exciting theatre of the last several years" by the CBC.

WIDE AWAKE HEARTS features Clea Alsip (Neil LaBute's The Way We Get By at Second Stage and 10K at 59E59), Maren Bush (Hoover Comes Alive!, dir. Alex Timbers, at La Jolla Playhouse), Ben Cole (Mike Bartlett's c*ckat The Duke on 42nd Street), and Tony Naumovski (Final Analysis at the Pershing Square Signature Center).

The design team includes Mike Riggs (lighting design); Elliott Davoren (sound design); and Rocco DiSanti (projection design). The production stage manager is Sofia Montgomery. The artistic producer is Zorana Kydd.

Brendan Gall (playwright) is a Halifax-born, Toronto-based artist recently transplanted to Los Angeles and is currently a writer and producer on the new Warner Bros/NBC drama "Blindspot," which films in New York City. Brendan has been nominated for four Dora Mavor Moore Awards (Toronto's Tony) for Best New Play, the K.M. Hunter Artist Award for Theatre, and Canada's prestigious Governor General's Literary Award for Drama. He is the author of four plays: A Quiet Place, Panhandled, Alias Godot and Wide Awake Hearts. Additionally, Brendan has co-written or co-created works with companies such as Public Recordings (300 Tapes), The Room (Red Machine), Unspun Theatre (Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump and Don't Wake Me), Convergence Theatre (AutoShow and The Gladstone Variations), and Small Wooden Shoe (I Keep Dropping Sh*t). His writing has been published by Coach House Books, translated into German and Italian, and been produced in the United States and Italy. For television, Brendan wrote and produced for the critically loved/commercially failed "The L.A. Complex" for The CW. Also an actor, Brendan graduated from George Brown Theatre School and is currently a playwright-in-residence at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre.

Stefan Dzeparoski (director) is a New York based director focusing on interdisciplinary stage practices at the cross section of art and technology. His directorial aesthetic is based on creative application of projected media and experimentation with the sound as dramaturgical source for creating stage narratives exploring linear and non-linear text based theatre. He is a Resident Director at BirdLand Theatre where he directed Gruesome Playground Injuries by Rajiv Joseph, Fortune and Men's Eyes and Soulseek. He also directed After The Fall by Arthur Miller, Roberto Zucco by Bernard Marie Koltes and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee. Stefan holds an MFA in Theatre Directing and MA in Theatre Studies. He also is an alumnus of Lincoln Center Directors Lab (2011) at the Lincoln Center Theater. He was voted Best Director at BroadwayWorld.com for Gruesome Playground Injuries and also received a Sterling Award nomination.

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