Tony-Winning Playwright John Guare to Toast EgoPo's New Season at 2017 Gala

On Sunday, June 4 at 6 p.m., EgoPo will be hosting its Annual Gala on the Water to kick off the 2017-18 John Guare Festival Season, featuring the world premiere of Guare's Lydie Breeze Trilogy. Guests will enjoy a Nantucket-themed summer evening at Morgan's Pier on the Delaware River where there will be seafood, songs, sangria, and special guests.

Tony Award-winning playwright John Guare will lead the toast to the season, followed by a private performance by Obie award-winning musician Cynthia Hopkins, who will be composing an original score for Lydie Breeze. The evening will continue with a Season Celebration featuring sea shanties sung by EgoPo artists and a seafood picnic buffet.

Fresh off the Tony nomination for his Six Degrees of Separation revival, John Guare will be EgoPo's honored guest for the Gala. The event will begin with Guare and Artistic Director Lane Savadove discussing Lydie Breeze and its genesis, and then Guare will be available to discuss his work with the guests.

In addition to Six Degrees of Separation (NY Drama Critics Circle Award; Olivier Award, Best Play), Guare's plays include The House of Blue Leaves (NY Drama Critics Circle Award); Landscape of the Body; Two Gentlemen of Verona (Tony Award); A Free Man of Color (Pulitzer Prize finalist); and Lydie Breeze. Film work includes Atlantic City (Oscar nomination, Venice Film Festival Best Film). He is the recipient of the 2003 PEN Master Dramatist Award; 2004 Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and 2005 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence. He has taught playwriting at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, NYU and Juilliard, and is co-editor of the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

Our second guest of honor is the internationally acclaimed musical performance artist, Cynthia Hopkins. Hopkins will give a private performance for the Gala Reception featuring her hauntingly beautiful folk music. Her work has been honored with many awards, including a 2015 Doris Duke Artist Award, a 2015 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2007 Alpert Award in Theater. As an independent performer and composer, Hopkins work has most recently appeared at the Bushwick Starr and before that at BAM. For her contribution to Big Dance Theater's Another Telepathic Thing, she received a 2001 Bessie Award for composition and a 2000 Obie Award for performance.

The Lydie Breeze Trilogy is the pinnacle of John Guare's career, and EgoPo has been working with Guare for nearly two-decades to make this production a reality. Thanks to major project support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, EgoPo will produce John Guare's epic American theater trilogy for the first time as the single theatrical event it was intended to be. The story follows Lydie Breeze on a journey from her childhood on Nantucket, to the Civil War battlefields, to the birth of American Utopianism, and the approach of 20th-century Industrialism. The Trilogy will be presented in three segments in early 2018 and then conclude the season as a three-consecutive-night experience, or as a one-day, nine-hour, theatrical epic with meal breaks in between.

Guests will spend the evening right on the banks of the Delaware River with an amazing vista of the Ben Franklin Bridge looming overhead in a private area at Morgan's Pier.

The Gala Reception begins at 6pm with an exclusive performance by Cynthia Hopkins, the opportunity to meet John Guare, and hors d'oeuvres featuring seafood towers of oysters, clams, and shrimp. The Season Celebration kicks off at 7pm with sea shanties sung by EgoPo artists, a seafood picnic buffet, and a silent auction.

The full evening of festivities including reception, celebration, three drinks and riverside seating is $80 per ticket. The season celebration only is $35, with one drink included.

All proceeds from EgoPo's Annual Gala on the Water go to support EgoPo's biggest project yet - The Lydie Breeze Trilogy. Join us at Morgan's Pier, 221 N. Columbus Boulevard, Philadelphia. Tickets are available at www.EgoPo.org or call Shayna at 267-273-1414.

EgoPo's Season Celebration features sea shanties performed by some of our favorite EgoPo artists: Ross Beschler, Carlo Campbell, AnDrew Carroll, Arlen Hancock, Stephanie Iozzia, Melanie Julian, Mark Knight, Maria Konstantinidis, Kirsten Kunkle, Rachel O'Hanlon Rodriguez, Amanda Schoonover, and Ed Swidey.

EgoPo Classic Theater is a non-profit theater company committed to revitalizing the great classics of theater and literature. We strive for virtuosity in vocal and physical performance in order to create innovative and provocative theatrical events.

EgoPo is ambitious in the scale of the plays it presents, staging modernist and avant-garde classics that are often under-produced because of their cast size and technical demands. EgoPo produces yearlong festival seasons that focus on a single playwright or theatrical genre. Each season is designed as a single journey in which we guide audiences through mainstage productions, a special performance event, interactive audience engagement events, and an annual Gala, all themed to the season. The result is a deep immersion into a single theatrical genre. The ultimate goal is to make exciting and challenging theater that provides audiences multiple levels of engagement with the opportunity for an in-depth experience.

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