COTE Fundraiser @ FUSION

12:32 AM / Posted by Ashley / comments (0)

COTE needs your support! We would love to see you at FUSION on September 10th for our first fundraiser. It's going to be a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and meet somne new ones. If you have any questions about it, please e-mail cooptheatreeast@gmail.com . Feel free to show up and bring friends! We look forward to seeing you.
Join us for an evening of cocktails and networking at FUSION, one of Manhattan's hottest bars!

September 10th 2008
6:30 PM- 9:00 PM
Fusion Bar and Lounge
818 10th Avenue (Between 54th and 55th Streets)
New York, NY
$20 will get you a drink and a raffle ticket.

All proceeds will go to support Co-Op Theatre East's first season.
As a collective, Co-Op Theatre East (COTE) will develop and produce theatre to create artistic dialogue on social and political issues, as reflected in our mission statement: Co-Op Theatre East believes in the power of art to foster a dialogue for social change. We provide an entertaining performance forum in which to ask evocative, challenging questions of artists and audiences on our way to creating collaborative answers.
COTE's still-evolving 2008-09 Season is already taking an exciting shape:
-In September we will present Questionable Content, our inaugural One-Act Festival, at EndTimes Underground @ The Gene Frankel Theater, featuring six plays from around the United States. Chosen from hundreds of submissions, these exciting new plays address issues from religious tolerance to living in a security-obsessed world.
-November will see the debut of co-founder Ashley Marinaccio's original full-length Documentary: A Suicide Narrative, an engaging and emotional reflection on acceptance in the wake of tragedy at a young age, also at EndTimes Underground.
-This winter, we will collaborate with ThingNY (www.thingny.com), one of New York's most exciting avant-garde classical music ensembles, on an evening of original experimental work exploring the dialogue between theatre and music.
-In the spring, COTE will present a collaborative production with actress Theresa Johnson of the beautiful and moving play My Name is Rachel Corrie. Created from the writings of a young peace activist whose life was cut tragically short, this play is a testament to the potential for one dedicated person to make a profound impact on the world.
These projects (and more!) are in the works for COTE, and we couldn't be more excited to see them come to fruition and share them with you and the world! It's been said that theatre is the art of the possible, which we fully believe. Even as a new group, our ideas are already attracting the attention of established players in the theatre scene, and we can't wait to show just how amazing and vital Co-Op Theatre East can be.
But we can't do it without your help!!!
If you cannot make this event but would still like to donate...

Your secure donation can be made online by visiting COTE's unique donation page on Fractured Atlas's website at https://www.fracturedatlas.org/donate/1785 .
To donate by mail, send a check made out to "Fractured Atlas" to: Co-Op Theatre East, c/o Robert Gonyo, 343 62nd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11220. Please be sure to include "Co-Op Theatre East" in the memo line! We Look Forward to Seeing You!

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Questionable Content

12:22 AM / Posted by Ashley / comments (0)

Tickets will be available on the Endtimes Productions website. Please come and support our first show! We're certainly looking forward to it.

CO-OP THEATRE EAST ANNOUNCES INAUGURAL ONE-ACT FESTIVAL
QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

Performances: September 18th-21st at 7:00 pm; matinee performances on September 20th and 21st at 2:00pm; EndTimes Underground @ the Gene Frankel Theater, 24 Bond Street, NYC 10012 (b/w Lafayette & Bowery); http://www.endtimesproductions.org

Co-Op Theatre East is proud to announce its inaugural one-act play festival, "Questionable Content", to debut in downtown Manhattan at the EndTimes Underground @ the Gene Frankel Theatre in September. The festival will feature six plays by emerging playwrights from around the United States, including:

- Absolutes by Craig Abernethy,
- Urashima Taro by Francesca Sanders,
- Hijab by Catherine Rush,
- There is No Dash by R. Harrington,
- Been Laden with Terrorette's Syndrome by Wayne K. Greenwell, and
- Building A Better Mousetrap by Scott McMorrow.

Chosen from hundreds of submissions, these exciting plays address current socio-political issues and religious intolerance and prison torture to living in a security-obsessed world.
Performances begin at 7 p.m., September 18th-21st, with 2 p.m. matinees on September 20th & 21st. All tickets are $15, and can be purchased through the EndTimes website at http://www.endtimesproductions.org/.

The one-acts of Questionable Content are directed by recent Performance Studies graduates from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, Casey Cleverly, Beth Elkins, Robert A. K. Gonyo, and Ashley Marinaccio. The ensemble includes:

Jessica Ayers, Michelle K. Crush, Anthony Ferriso, Loren Ferriso, Sheira Feuerstein, Kim Fischer, Alex Herrald, Nik Kourtis, Sarah Nichols, Nneoma Nkuku, Trina Mar Shumsonk, Adia Tucker, Jeffrey Winthrop, and Rasha Zamamiri.

Founded in April of 2008, the Co-Op Theatre East (COTE) believes in the power of art to foster a dialogue for social change. COTE provides an entertaining performance forum in which to ask evocative, challenging questions of artists and audiences on our way to creating collaborative answers. For more information on Co-Op Theatre East, please visit www.myspace.com/cooptheatreeast.

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Pictures from "Inseminary" by Dicky Murphy

7:00 PM / Posted by Ashley / comments (0)

I didn't realize how grainy these were until I uploaded them. UGH. Well, we'll just pretend that they are like that on purpose....






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Another NY Times Theatre Article Worth Posting...

6:34 PM / Posted by Ashley / comments (0)

I love reading up on the backgrounds of professional directors...



Harvard’s Not-So-Square New Director
By CELIA MCGEE
Published: August 13, 2008

At least so it might appear from the paper — recognized in the academic vernacular as Diane Paulus’s curriculum vitae — that so impressed the university’s search committee in its 16-month quest for a new artistic director for the resident American Repertory Theater that in May it offered her the position, starting this fall.
On the list of her accomplishments as a theater and opera director, Ms. Paulus, 42, could point to “The Donkey Show,” an adaptation of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” set to 1970s disco that played the Pyramid Club and Club El Flamingo in New York as well as watering holes abroad; a Monteverdi “Orfeo” in the vein of Truman Capote; the English National Opera-Young Vic production of “Lost Highway,” based on the David Lynch movie; last summer’s pro wrestling-flavored “Turandot: The Rumble for the Ring” at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y.; and the New York Shakespeare Festival’s “Hair,” now at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Generation MTV in their sensory overload, often with compact running times and orgiastically esoteric in their sourcing, these productions could take the starch out of the most tightly stuffed J. Press shirt.
At the Delacorte last month a tomboyish young techie type scooted around the bleachers during rehearsal one 95-degree afternoon and turned out to be the director. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ms. Paulus urged her sweltering cast. “Feel the love. Share with the audience. But not kitschy. It should be a snapshot of Fourth Street.”
Later, she recalled, “One of the first plays I directed was ‘Twelfth Night’ in a community garden on West 89th Street. The community board said I could do it as long as we didn’t stop people from gardening. You have to be able to morph the mission. The No. 1 thing that motivates me is the audience. You want to make them part of the transformative elation of theater and turn them into your community.”
Her use of unusual settings and genre-bending material as well as her shows’ frequent inclusion of the paying customers should come in handy at Harvard, particularly under the tenure of a new president who has made it a priority to integrate the arts more into university life.
“Diane operates on many levels,” said Jordan Roth, an early producer of “The Donkey Show” and now a vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters. “Part of her signature is that you might feel you’re experiencing a night out with great music, a deconstruction of Shakespeare and everything in between. She explores the highbrow and lowbrow in one.”
Ms. Paulus is herself a 1987 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard with a master’s degree in directing from the Columbia theater program and teaching stints at Columbia and Yale. Those credentials counted considerably with the search committee, especially after it had to start a second hunt when an earlier choice, Anna D. Shapiro, the “August: Osage County” director, decided not to take the job of replacing Robert Woodruff, whose contract was not renewed.
To Ms. Paulus falls the task of revitalizing a theater that has lost luster and audiences since its heyday in the 1980s under Robert Brustein, who retired in 2002 but retains the title artistic consultant.
She can and has drawn on many different cultures, from hip-hop to Aeschylus to the American musical classics reflected in her staging of “Kiss Me Kate” at the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., this summer; adaptations of Cornelius Eady’s bluesy work; and the love story of her own G.I. father and Japanese mother in the aftermath of World War II, told in her acclaimed “Swimming With Watermelons.”
“It’s going to be 24/7,” said Ms. Shapiro, a Steppenwolf Theater member and the director of Northwestern University’s graduate directing program, who praised the selection of Ms. Paulus. “When I thought about it, I realized there would be so much to do in the beginning, I wouldn’t see the inside of a classroom for two years.”
Ms. Paulus will have a permanent academic appointment and will somehow have to make even more time to help explore the controversial question, fast-tracked by Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s new president, of whether to establish an undergraduate theater concentration.
She must also embrace chores like fund-raising and marketing. “I’ve always wanted to be an arts leader,” she said. “I’ve always been entrepreneurial. You just have to find how to make good work in smart financial ways.”
In many instances her collaborator has been her husband, Randy Weiner, a founder of the Box nightclub performance space on the Lower East Side. They met on a high school musical and went to college together, later forming the collaborative theater arts group Project 400, where Ms. Paulus — trained as a concert pianist and at the School of American Ballet — extended her bent for boundary-crossing.
The first American Repertory season under her direction will be 2009-10, and she said she was not ready to talk about it. But a musical adaptation of “Prometheus Bound” that she is developing with Steven Sater, who wrote the book and lyrics for “Spring Awakening,” will probably fill one slot. The high-tech opera “Death and the Powers,” which she has been working on at the M.I.T. Media Lab and the Grimaldi Forum for performance in Monaco next year, may also make landfall in Cambridge.
She recently persuaded the Hayden Planetarium to let her stage Haydn’s opera buffa “Il Mondo Della Luna” there in the future and said she hoped to leave American Repertory headquarters in the Loeb Drama Center on occasion by moving to specific sites and “exploding out of the theater.”
“A.R.T. needs to feel startling and radical again,” she added, “to live up to its legacy of being a beacon by going some surprising places.”

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Photoblog

10:48 AM / Posted by Ashley / comments (0)

"Inseminary"- Opening Night!

11:44 PM / Posted by Ashley / comments (0)

"Inseminary" had a successful opening tonight! We had a huge crowd (especially for that particular space). Congrats to the cast, Al and Trina and Dicky Murphy who wrote a fantastic script. If you are in the NYC area this week, please stop by to check it out. It's worth the $10. Once again... the information about the show (just in case you don't feel like scrolling down) is right here. Hope to see you there.

Inseminary
By Dicky Murphy
Directed by Ashley Marinaccio
Featuring Al Hasnas and Trina Shumsonk
August 20th – 24th
American Theatre of Actors8:00 pm/ 2:00 pm matinee on Sunday, August 24th
Tickets: $10
Call 212.581.3044 to make reservations
Location: 314 West 54th StreetNew York, NY 10019Closest subway: C, or E to West 50th Street. Walk north to West 54th Street, west to the theatre.
Elizabeth and I finished auditions for "Estrogenius: Girl Power" today. EGP will take place at the Manhattan Theatre Source in October. It's an initiative to empower young girls through theatre and the arts. The girls will be writing pieces and creating a show about the lives of teen girls. Every girl that came in was fantastic. Seriously, the casting process is seriously tough. We're looking forward to working with the girls and have tons of plans for guest artists, ice breakers and theatre activities. I look forward to sharing more about this, as I'm super excited!
Misty May and Kerri Walsh just won the gold... again! YAY! I'm an Olympic fiend. I get extremely patriotic and defensive if the USA doesn't place (YES! I know it's NOT about the medal). I don't watch sports. In fact, I probably will not watch another sport until the winter Olympics come around in two years. Although, I am hoping to attend them in person. I love 17 days of watching nothing but hardcore sports. I have a ton of respect for all of the Olympic athletes! There is nothing better than watching people who have worked hard and dedicated their lives to something succeed.

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Inseminary at the American Theatre of Actors - This Week!

11:15 PM / Posted by Ashley / comments (0)

Come see the newest show I'm directing...

Inseminary

By Dicky Murphy

Directed by Ashley Marinaccio

Featuring Al Hasnas and Trina Shumsonk

August 20th – 24th
American Theatre of Actors
8:00 pm/ 2:00 pm matinee on Sunday, August 24th

Tickets: $10
Call 212.581.3044 to make reservations
Location: 314 West 54th StreetNew York, NY 10019Closest subway: C, or E to West 50th Street. Walk north to West 54th Street, west to theatre
http://www.appleboxdesign.com/ATA/ata.html

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