Connect Five: Four Plays, One Audience,
presented by The Common Tongue, will play a limited engagement at The Ars Nova Building January 5-16. 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 2011 Culturemart festival, running Jan 7-23 at HERE, is an annual event offering a first look at the current projects in development from artists in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) in a dynamic festival setting. With process as the focus, Culturemart gives audiences a glimpse of what’s to come while offering the artists an invaluable opportunity to have their work performed and seen, providing helpful feedback as they continue on in their creative process. Culturemart features work in a variety of disciplines including theater, music, dance, puppetry, multimedia productions and an installation event.
Black Nativity Now, taking place Dec 18 at The Theatre at St. Clement’s, is a holiday gospel pageant for our time and for all people. Set inside a fabulous show-biz church in the midst of the famed and scabrous landscape of Times Square, Black Nativity Now tells the story of the birth of Christ. This setting provides a colorful world of seekers, hustlers and lost souls, providing the perfect jump-off for an evening of exuberant music and dance that celebrates humanity’s need for hope. Under the direction of a pastor heavily influenced by James Brown—and supported by a choir versed in gospel, pop, funk and soul—Black Nativity Now gives new meaning to “peace on earth.”
In Mapping Möbius, an aging scientist realizes his inquiries continually return him to a model of his own mind. He devises a set of experiments that blur the distinction between his inner and outer worlds, and recruits a young assistant to help him learn if the elemental patterns that haunt him are in his brain or present in the natural world. Is he unraveling the mystery, or is it unraveling him? Find out at La MaMa E.T.C. Dec 2 through 19.The Flying Karamazov Brothers are currently playing at off-Broadway’s Minetta Lane Theatre in an open-ended engagement of their eponymous hit show. Each night, the audience is invited to bring objects to the theater for the FKBs to keep airborne in a challenge that ends either with a pie in the face or a standing ovation. The show suits all audiences: adults, students, students who watch Glee, tourists, theatergoers, theatre-avoiders, pseudo-intellectuals, Abe Vigoda, the friendless, geeks, hedge fund managers, who are now Duane Reade assistant managers, kids, disgraced religious leaders, Kardashians, and politicians.
What Do You Think?