The Shalimar LATE AND LIVE

The Shalimar
LATE AND LIVE
A buffet of exciting, transgressive new performances by some of NYC's favorite downtown artists.

THIS WEEKEND!
10PM, Dec. 13-15
$FREE$ with Admission to You People
$5 if you don't see You People
$2 Brooklyn Brewery Brews and $4 Whiskey regardless

Thursday December 13th
Neal Medlyn's R.I.P. BABY MEDLYN, an all-new, all-hip-hop memorial service for Neal's dead baby, complete with back-up dancers and tribute video with Brendan Kennedy and others and Jody Christopherson performs something brand new.

Friday December 14th
Journey Home, the first episode of The RedTerror Squad's radio drama about a little family who take the short-cut to one kitty's homeland, Zhenesse's Christmas Dinner, and something amazing by Tommy Smith.

Saturday December 15th
Adam Lerman's America and brand spanking new work by Jessica Hedrick and Kim Gainer.

More performances to be announced, please check theshalimar.blogspot.com for updates.

tickets on sale for You People

You People (Short Plays About Those People)









The Interart Annex
500 West 52nd Street #2W
btwn 10th and 11th Aves

Nov 30-Dec 16
Thurs - Sun
all performances at 8pm

only
$10

get your tix here
or call 212-352-3101



Blanco
by Hilly Hicks Jr.
directed by Sam Buggeln

Deseret Desire
by Josh Liveright
directed by Camilo Fontecilla

Miss Morely's Revenge
by Sharyn Rothstein
directed by R.J. Tolan

Splinter
by Nastaran Ahmadi
directed by Jessi D. Hill

Tostitos
by Michael John Garcés
directed by May Adrales

Songs by Tommy Smith and Davide Berardi
directed by Shoshona Currier and Joey Williamson

with
Matt Bridges, Chip Brookes, Blaire Brooks, Devin Dunne Cannon, Barrett Doss, Dawn Evans*, Nina Freeman*, Edwin Lee Gibson*, Jenny Gomez, Kelli Lynn Harrison, Heather Lamb, Lizzie Moore, Andres Munar*, Laurie Naughton*, Justin Okin*, Allison Jill Posner, Charles Semine*, Jen Taher*

Shani Colleen Murfin stage manager
Joey Williamson musical director
Ariella Bowden costumes
Ien DeNio sound designer
Lisa Kopitsky fight choreographer
Lucas Benjaminh Krech lighting designer

*denotes member of actors equity association

Result Oriented

We opened tonight.

We opened our show with eight actors, 40 props, 3 messy food props, 5 big moments of stage combat, 3 musical instruments, 3 brand new handheld mics, and hundreds of light and sound cues. And we had never done a run through.

We have a love / hate relationship with festivals. They are a great way to audience build and do theater on the cheap. But often we find ourselves sacrificing certain elements of our show. Beauty. Safety. You know.

I will say, this is probably the best run festival we have ever been a part of, in the snazziest building, with the best air conditioning and the most competent tech crew. But even with all those good vibes, it was scary for everyone to go on stage in front of a fair sized audience having only done a cue to cue.

It was rocky and it was great. We are prepped to run for a month in Edinburgh so it's a priceless opportunity for us to use this week at 59e59 to iron out kinks. All that said, it is so scary sitting in the back of the house and feeling like you've just sent eight actors to the lions. They were amazing in defeating their impossible task. I was a bit of a case.

Anyway, here are pictures. The show is gorgeous. Serge took these last night at tech.


















boxing











It was a long night.

the voice that launched a thousand ships...

I did a podcast for nytheatre.com with a bunch of truly fun artists. Check it out.

Read about indie theater now on the nytheatrecast blog!

If you are pressed for time and want to only hear the sultry sounds of Shoshona Currier expounding thoughts on war and theater, I start chattering at minute 17. But I suggest listening to the whole thing. It's pretty fun.

Especially fun, was seeing my friend Jack Ferver, who I haven't seen or spoken to in...hm...four years? I seem to remember running into him in a yoga class a while back, but we haven't made anything together in ages.

What? You don't know Jack Ferver? Oh I think you do! Maybe from this:



Or this:



But really, these don't do justice to Jack's talent. I first saw Jack in a reading at New York Theatre Workshop and was drawn to his impeccable timing and snarky wit. Soonafter, we met through our friend Glynis and in person I was drawn to his impeccable timing and snarky wit. As well as the slightly crazy look in his eye. We did some little reading-ish projects with the now defunct Black Cat Group and then sort of fell out of each other's lives, which is how it goes in New York City.

It was so great to see him, and ride the train with him, and laugh with him again. So please listen to his part of the podcast as well (he's first!) and maybe even go see his show called When We Were Young and Filled With Fear. I'm going to.

Also, my friend Ed is on this podcast too. He's second, chatting about his play Nosferatu and I suggest you also go see that. Ed's a strange fun guy who makes strange fun plays.

Actually, you should see all the shows we talk about in this podcast! It was a really fun roup of artists all slogging away in various festivals around the city. Getting together to chat about theater felt like a friendly little showing of community...I'm glad I was there.

Viva Sweden

So I've been freaking the fuck out about our one set piece. The bed. Yes, as far as sets go we are often quite minimal. Last time we went to Edinburgh we got by with rolling up the black curtain that was serving as crossover masking, setting two rolling chairs on the stage and hanging this metal grate thing on the back wall. I think we found that on the floor in the space. Low maintenance.

This show has no less than 25 hand props, 3 musical instruments, 2 costumes per person, 3 body mics, and a large rolling bed. So the issue comes up of how the hell to get all of this stuff to Scotland.

Well, the props can go in luggage. One of the instruments we will have to buy over there, the costumes go in the luggage, the body mics go in the hand luggage. And the bed. Oh the bed.

See, we're doing a short run here at 59e59 that ends the day before we go. So using something here and then shipping it is not really an option. If we can use it and then stuff it in a suitcase, well that works, but for the life of me I could not figure out how to get a bed to fold down into a small square. I wish I was as ingenious as Banana Bag and Bodice who, when faced with the prospect of doing The Sewers in Dublin without their stunning set that included 3 detailed walls, a roof, and a million doors, holes, and secret openings of magic, decided to recreate their entire set out of CARDBOARD. Cardboard that FOLDED DOWN AND FIT INTO A SUITCASE.

Shit.

Not only do we need a bed that rolls, but we need it to be structurally sound enough to carry the weight of at least 5 people while rolling. It should also have some prop storage underneath. Oh and beautiful. Let it be beautiful.

I sat here, on the futon, late one night, searching UK websites, actually looking for cots or something to stick in our flat in Edinburgh (we are just a couple of beds short of appropriate boundaries). I cruised Argos and Tescoe and finally found my way to Ikea.

Ikea.

IKEA.

Of course. They have Ikea. We have Ikea. Every country has roughly the same shit at their Ikea. I could buy the bed here, we could make the set, it could be amazing, and when we get to Edinburgh we can buy the same bed at their Ikea, build the rest of it there and we will have the exact same set piece.

Which is how on Tuesday Curtis and I found ourselves on a New Jersey Transit operation heading towards what can only be described as the promised land. Curtis is a brilliant opera designer and painter and he is a constant source of support for The Shalimar. He has let us rent out corners of his studio before for cheap. He has taken me paint shopping and taught me to goldleaf, which is the best thing ever ever EVER. He created the floor design for the recent production of stirring and then he came in and PAINTED IT. He and his amazing wife Julie come to our parties, donate to our cause, and laugh at all our jokes. They are good people. And Curtis agreed to come to Ikea with me to make sure I didn't buy a bed made out of tinker toys because it was the cheapest one they had.

We found a bed. And for my part, my pathetic little part, I worked on Curtis' artist statement for him. He's in the midst of making this beautiful series of dictator-based self-portraits and had hit a bit of a wall with his statement. It happens. So while he sketched pictures of beds and took measurements, I thought up innovative ways to explain the man behind the art.

It was a good day.

And now I'm off to buy lumber.

research

I felt I should point out that besides frantically raising money, The Shalimar also makes plays. In case I haven't physically shaken you in hopes that money will fall from your pockets and screamed in your ear how great this show is, let me tell you a little about LA FEMME EST MORTE or Why I Should Not F!%# My Son. It's about America. And celebrity. And the fact that our country is at war yet we obsess over Shilo Jolie-Pitt and whether or not Lindsay Lohan has fucking died yet. Seriously, when will she just die? The play is based on Phaedra, so there is also some good old fashioned incest and religious guilt. Really it's about what happens here in America when our men go to war. So here are the videos I'm watching as inspiration. I will warn that they are not all for the faint of heart.

(Sidebar. It's pretty interesting to me what people post on youtube. It's interesting that I can't see the war on the news but anyone, including my seven year old brother, can watch it on the fucking internet.)

stirring opens TONIGHT!

Come see what all the buzz is about...














all photos by Serge Cashman

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!

click the image to enlarge...

Alien Invasion

The showing last night went really well...to our surprise. (We were a little nervous about the work...) Three ESL teachers brought their classes so we ended up with an audience of 75 international students. They were a very live audience, amped up, really interested in the subject matter, for obvious reasons.




In the talk back a Colombian girl spoke up about what a different life you live in America, that in your home country you may live in a big apartment with a great career and here you will have a tiny apartment and a menial job.



A Sudanese man thought it was important to work on a plot about credit cards for immigrants, how they don't understand the rules of credit when they first arrive. Then between student loans and buying overpriced junk and not really understanding it all, they end up in unmanageable debt.


One Albanian woman insisted that we should not present immigrants as depressed and having no options. She was worried that we were painting these characters in a hopeless light.She wanted to make sure the four characters would have more joy and optimism in the second half of the play




Overwhelmingly though the audience really enjoyed it. They paid attention and they laughed and someone in the front row took a picture with his phone of Kim in her stripper outfit. I'm sure she's already all over the internet and YOU CAN'T BUY THAT PUBLICITY.



I took these pictures, so they are shit, but they'll give an idea of what we're making. Photos of the epic journey to Rudys to follow soon. Stay tuned...



And it's a good thing those classes were there. Otherwise we would had an audience of seven. So I must shout out to Allison, Gwen, Marcy, May, Ben, Gary, and Serge for making the trip in the freezing weather. Gold star. All the rest of you...shame.

work-in-progress

Shalimar Productions is totally psyched to present a work-in-progress showing of

ALIENS

a new play by Saviana Stanescu
directed by Shoshona Currier

Tuesday, February 6
8pm
at THE LITTLE THEATER
at Laguardia Performing Arts Center

LaGuardia Community College/CUNY

31-10 Thomson Ave. Long Island City
(7 Train to 33rd St or E, V, R to Queens Plaza or check here for more directions)

ABSOLUTELY FREE! NO RESERVATIONS REQUIRED!

Please join us for a few scenes of this new work and a discussion after.

featuring: Brandon Bales, Matt Bridges, Kim Gainer*, Christopher Illing*, Jen Taher*, Joey Williamson*
stage manager: Shani Murfin

ALIENS is a play about cross-cultural love and greencard-marriage that explores the subtle and complex sides of the immigrant experience, challenging and using the stereotypes about love and marriage in New York. Does a marriage with an American citizen solve every problem? Is a greencard a strong enough reason for a marriage? ALIENS is a story about the American dream and its everyday nightmare.

ALIENS is based on true stories of immigration explored collaboratively by Shalimar Productions and fictionalized by a playwright who is trying to understand her own story.

Made possible by a LaGuardia Performing Arts Center Space Residency

Bad Bad Girls...

And in a further excercise to empty out iPhoto, here are pictures from Bad Girls Good Writers by Sibyl Kempson, which played at the $ellout Festival at the Brick this past June.


Sarah Murphy playing the narrator















Sam Desz, Gabriel Grilli, and Jennifer Gordon Thomas















Sam and Jennifer












with Sarah Elliott

Rolls Andre and Matt Bridges rock out while Gabriel, Jennifer, Sam, and Sarah Murphy eat pretzels.

Gabriel, Sam, and Jennifer.










The whole cast sings Van Halen