Plays & Players Presents the World Premiere of Joy Cutler’s Pardon My Invasion

For the fourth straight season, Plays & Players presents a world premiere by a local playwright that asks the questions vital to our city and our contemporary lives as citizens. In Pardon My Invasion, when Private Malcolm Jack goes AWOL from serving in Iraq, he discovers there are a lot safer places to hide than in the body of a 13-year-old girl. Her novelist mother enlists the biggest bombshell in her pulp fiction arsenal to seduce him out, but it will take more imagination than that to end the occupation in this dark and twisted new farce spearing sex, gender, and invasion from Philadelphia's own Joy Cutler.

Pardon My Invasion is directed by Cara Blouin, the writer and director of Dan Rottenberg is Thinking About Raping You: An Educational Presentation, which performed at Plays & Players in June, 2011 and drew national attention as a comedic response to an article published by the eponymous editor-in-chief of Broad Street Review. "Joy Cutler's work speaks in a surreal voice that doesn't apologize for being distinctly female," says Ms. Blouin. "The very funny women who drive this story will feel refreshingly true to female viewers, and men who enjoy being challenged will appreciate that the show neither preaches to nor coddles them. "

Joy Cutler has worked as a playwright and performer with the San Francisco performance ensemble, Elbows Akimbo and with Berlin theater companies, The Berlin Playactors and Out To Lunch Theater Group. She has written and performed solo work in Berlin, Amsterdam and NYC and co-created with Priscilla Be the Berlin performance duo, The Flying Buttresses. Joy moved to Philadelphia in 2007, where her short plays, The Frogg Prince, The Craving, and The Stormy Hanky were performed in the 2009, 2010, and 2011 Philadelphia Bake-Off and New Play Festival (now PIFA New Play Festival). The Frogg Prince went on to be produced at the International School in Jakarta, Indonesia, and rose again in the 2011 Philadelphia Fringe Festival in The Undead. Joy's script, Nightshift(ing) was performed at West Chester University in a one-act play festival in February, 2011.

Pardon My Invasion stars Julian Cloud, Emily Gibson, Theresa Leahy, Joe O'Brien, Angela Smith, and Jennifer Summerfield.

Plays & Players (P&P) is at once 100 years old and 3 years old, having recently changed from a community theatre to a professional theatre focused on supporting and nurturing the work of local artists through performance and development. It hired its first Producing Artistic Director, Daniel Student, in its organization's history, and has reached a level of prominence for the growing quality of its productions as well as its ability to launch the careers of some of the city's most talented performers. One of the hottest companies in town, and winner of Philadelphia Magazine's Best In Philly award two years in a row, Plays & Players has become a rare place where a rich past meets an exciting present. Please visit us at www.playsandplayers.org.

TICKETS: $20 in advance, $25 at the door. Group rate (for purchase of 10 or more tickets) at $10 each. Order online at www.playsandplayers.org or by calling 1-800-595-4TIX

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