New Georges (Susan Bernfield, Artistic Director; Sarah Cameron Sunde, Associate Director; Jaynie Saunders Tiller, Managing Director) will present the World Premiere of Sylvan Oswald's Nightlands. This Off-Broadway limited engagement, kicking off their 20th Anniversary season, will be at HERE (145 6th Avenue; entrance on Dominick, 1 block south of Spring Street) and begins October 5 and continues through October 29th only. Opening Night is set for October 10th (7pm).
Tamilla Woodard directs a cast that includes Rachel Leslie, Annie McNamara (Gatz, The Sound and the Fury, God's Ear), Michael Milligan (La Bete, August: Osage County), Hubert Point-Du Jour (The Brother/Sister Plays, Angels In America, Target Margin's The Tempest), and Linda Marie Larson.
Nightlands, will have scenic design by OBIE and Bessie Award winner Jim Findlay, costume design by Emily DeAngelis, lighting design by Stephen Arnold, and sound design by Hillary Charnas.
In Nightlands' uniquely imagined memory of North Philadelphia, five actors fluidly trade races and genders to play a community of characters. The protagonists are loosely based on Sylvan's Jewish grandmother and the African-American woman who taught her astrology in the mid-1970s. In Sylvan's hands, the action is placed against the 1964 Philadelphia race riots, adding gravity to the already-tense circumstances of the two women's emerging friendship. Unsatisfied at home and in her job selling wigs, Netta Klein seeks out Ivy Silver for an astrological reading. Soon Netta wants more, and asks Ivy to teach her astrology. Unable to deny their mutual attraction, Ivy agrees. Unfazed by the taboos of the era, their secret relationship grows. Ivy begins to employ Netta on her public-access astrology radio show, and the two women envision stealing away together. When race violence ignites the city, the women confront the fragility of their dream.
Sylvan Oswald's plays include Sun Ra, Profanity, Pony (About Face Theatre, Chicago), Vendetta Chrome (Clubbed Thumb), and Painful Adventures (St. Ann's Puppet Lab; Bryant Lake Bowl). Sylvan recently collaborated on Dan Hurlin's Disfarmer (St. Ann's Warehouse) and is at work on Zoetrope, a music-theater piece with Alec Duffy and Mimi Lien. Sylvan is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a Six Points Fellow for 2010-‘12 and the Dorothy B. Strelsin Playwriting Fellow at Soho Rep for 2010-‘11. Sylvan's plays have been developed and presented at The Foundry Theater, The Hangar Theater, The McCarter Theater, New York Theater Workshop, Portland Center Stage, Soho Rep's Writer/Director Lab, and P73's I73 Writing Group among others. Sylvan is a transgender playwright who uses the pronoun "he." www.sylvanoswald.com.
Tamilla Woodard has directed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Culture Project, Urban Stages, Dance Theatre Workshop, The Kitchen, MCC Theater, Lark Play Development Center, HERE, PS122 and for festivals in the United States and internationally. Most recently, she directed Saviana Stanescu's POLANSKI POLANSKI at the Sibiu International Theater Festival in Romania, after runs in TerraNova Collective's SoloNOVA Festival and at HERE Arts Center. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Drama, where she was artistic director of the Yale Cabaret, is a winner of New Dramatists' Charles Bowden Award and the League of Professional Theatre Women's Josephine Abady Award, and is a founding member of The Internationalists - a collective of directors from around the world creating an interactive global theater community.
