STAGED READINGS
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, translated by Shishir Kurup
Directed by Sabrina Peck
Play On Festival at Classic Stage Company
CSC in partnership with Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Play On Shakespeare presented 39 readings from the Play On Shakespeare translation project. OSF commissioned 36 playwrights—more than half are women and more than half are playwrights of color, each paired with a dramaturg—to translate Shakespeare's works into contemporary modern English to celebrate the enduring impact of the Bard's plays. These commissions challenge the playwrights to bring the same level of dramatic pressure and rigor of language to their work as is present in the originals, deepening our understanding and engagement with Shakespeare. Lue Douthit is the Executive Director of Play On Shakespeare.
Cast: Rajesh Bosh (Casius), Nemuna Ceesay, Gina Daniels, Michael Gabriel Goodfriend, Sanjiv Jhaveri, Vanessa Kai, Gregg Mozgala (Antony), Olivia Negron (Julius Caesar), Sathya Sridharan, Tramell Tillman (Brutus), Channie Waites and Jeena Yi (Portia). Dramaturg: Nancy Keystone
Merchant On Venice by Shishir Kurup, based on the Shakespeare
Directed by Sabrina Peck
Queens Theatre in the Park
Merchant on Venice is a witty, sharp and ambitious work based on Shakespeare's Merchant of Veniceoffering biting humor and a fresh perspective on intra-communal hostilities. Kurup has set his story in Culver City, California, where hatred and intolerance among Hindus and Muslims have grown to a boiling point, albeit leavened by humor. Shylock, for example, is reconceived as Sharuk, a wealthy Muslim. The play is written in modern verse with the present day South Asian/American pop lingo, blank verse and current references, and is infused with original music.
Cast: Brinda Dixit. Christopher Brown, Imran Sheikh, Lipica Shah, Naren Weiss, Nikita Tewani, Rahoul Roy, Rajesh Bose, and Samrat Chakrabarti
A Winter's Captive by Chiori Miyagawa
Directed by Sabrina Peck
Brooklyn College MFA Directing Program
Miyagawa calls this play "a comical calamity." Inspired by an actual event, this is the story of a woman who witnesses a man fall through the ice in Central Park. The man is an undocumented immigrant from Honduras named Miguel. In Chiori's play, Erica is haunted by the event and her powerlessness to stop his death. She feels helpless by extension to fix all the things wrong with society, of which this calamity is just one example. As Erica's anxiety about the contemporary world's problems increases, the characters get increasingly off-kilter; she invokes historical figures, like Ethel Rosenberg, Pauline Newman (who led the garment workers strike in 1909), the governor of Jamestown--and her ex-boyfriend. Ultimately it is her conversations with Miguel himself that help Erica carry on. As with all of Miyagawa's plays, the dead and the living seem to co-exist in ways that bring new understanding to her characters.
Cast: Sarah Poleshuck, Danny Capote, Isabelle Pierre, Michael James Shaw, Tom Datnow and Melissa Diaz
Ducklings by Amina Henry
Directed by Sabrina Peck
Produced by BookShop Workshop @ WORD in Brooklyn
A wild ride through the lives of five contestants at the DanceHall Queen of Pittsburgh Competition. Set in various living rooms, the Red Rooster Inn, the Dance Hall and an alley behind the community center, a hustler, a mother, a girlfriend, a librarian and the reigning Queen all compete for the title. It's a dance to the death.
Cast: Carolina Do, Mohit Gautam, Isabelle Pierre, Henry Ponthieu, Leta Renée-Alan, Naren Weiss and Katherine Ella Wood
The Zionists by Zohar Tirosh-Polk
Directed by Sabrina Peck
New Play Series at Brooklyn College
THE ZIONISTS is an epic drama about three generations of one Zionist family and their search for home. From Poland to Palestine, to Israel and later the U.S., THE ZIONISTS asks: Where is home? What is home? At what price?
Cast: JJ Condon, Chris Donovan, Vasile Flutur, Jane House, Layla Khoshnoudi, Patrick McCormick and Peter Reznikoff.
The Trials of Monica Lewinsky from the Grand Jury Transcripts
Created by Todd London, Sabrina Peck and Anne Washburn
Directed by Sabrina Peck
Developed at New Dramatists, NYC 1999
Performed at HBO’s US Comedy Arts Festival, Aspen, CO
Trials began as a staged reading at New Dramatists, a New York City institution that supports the work of living playwrights. Todd London, Artistic Director of New Dramatists, was interested in exploring whether verbatim transcripts—with their characters and drama—constitute a play, and whether theater had something meaningful to offer our experience of these events. Because of my experience working with recorded interviews and primary sources, I was asked to direct and help shape such a piece. The result was a surprisingly poignant and moving, if often hilarious, piece of drama. In the version presented at New Dramatists, I cast three women as Monica, and they rotated into performance at emotionally motivated places in the text. In the version we brought to HBO's US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, a single actress played Lewinsky, her Grand Jury scenes intercut with delightful and haunting telephone scenes with Linda Tripp. Additional texts included personal notes between the President and Lewinsky; the list of gifts they exchanged; and the Independent Counsel's clinical chronology of the emotional day Lewinsky was apprehended in the mall.
WITH Yusef Bulos, Craig Carlisle, Moira Driscoll, Judy Gold, David Greenspan, Novella Nelson, John Rothman, Teddy Smith and Abigail López as Monica Lewinsky. The New Dramatists reading included Culver Casson, Abigail Revasch and Emme Shaw with Lori Tan Chinn, Quincy Long, Akili Prince, James Urbaniak and Damien Young.
“The Strong applause and vigorous audience discussion that followed marked the evening as something more than a stunt…The actors as much as the audience seemed mesmerized by the hourlong experiment.”
—The New York Times