The Public Theater (Artistic Director Oskar Eustis; Executive Director Andrew D. Hamingson) will present a one-night-only reading of THE BREACH, a new play by Catherine Filloux, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Joe Sutton. THE BREACH will be performed at The Public Theater on Monday, September 22 at 7 p.m. The reading is free and open to the public.
The phenomenon of a natural calamity like Hurricane Katrina creates chaos, pain and confusion on a mythic scale. In THE BREACH, a play on the drowning of New Orleans, playwrights Filloux, McCraney and Sutton weave together three unique and separate stories from those who survived the storm. In its exploration of the impacts of Katrina, this powerful and surreal play taps the conspiracy theories, loss and nascent hope of this devastated American region.
A post-show discussion will feature award-winning New York Daily News journalist Nicole Bode, who covered Katrina and its aftermath; Robert Carey, Vice President of the International Rescue Committee’s Resettlement Department; and academic Lee Clarke, author of Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination. Writer Larry Blumenfeld, who has conductive extensive research on cultural recovery in New Orleans, will moderate the discussion.
For tickets to the performance, simply email thebreach@publictheater.org or call (212) 539-8597 with your name and the number of tickets you would like to reserve. All tickets are free and requests will be filled on a first-come, first-serve basis.
CATHERINE FILLOUX (Playwright) has been writing about genocide, human rights, and social justice for the past 20 years. Her plays include Killing the Boss, Lemkin’s House, The Beauty Inside, Eyes of the Heart, Silence of God, Mary and Myra, Arthur’s War, Photographs From S-21, and Escuela del Mundo. In addition, she is the librettist for the operas The Floating Box: A Story in Chinatown (composer: Jason Kao Hwang) and Where Elephants Weep (composer: Him Sophy). Among her many honors are the PeaceWriting Award, the Roger L. Stevens Award, the Eric Kocher Playwrights Award, and the Callaway Award. She has been a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Cambodia and Morocco and a playwright in residence at the William Inge Center for the Arts. Filloux received her M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and her French Baccalaureate with Honors in Toulon, France. She is a co-founder of Theatre Without Borders, a volunteer organization engaged in international theater exchange.
TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY (Playwright). His play The Brothers Size premiered at The Public Theater last season and subsequently played The Abbey Theater in Ireland. His other work includes The Brother/Sister Plays (The Brothers Size, In The Red and Brown Water, and Marcus: Or the Secret of Sweet), Wig Out!, Without/Sin, Run Mourner, Run, A Taurian Tale, and Promise Not to Tell. McCraney’s honors include the 2007 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the 2007 Whiting Writing Award, and the Cole Porter Award; in addition, the Young Vic’s production of The Brothers Size was nominated for Outstanding Achievement by an Affiliate Theater at the Olivier Awards. McCraney has been named the International Writer in Residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2008 to 2010, the Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, and a seven-year resident at New Dramatists Center in New York. He has attended the British American Drama Academy and received a Masters Degree from the Yale School of Drama in playwriting.
Joe Sutton (Playwright). His provocative plays about politics, race, real estate, the Second Amendment, and other topical issues include Voir Dire (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Play Award of the American Theatre Critics Association), As It is in Heaven, The Benefits of Doubt, Black Market, The Third Army, Special Interests, Restoring the Sun, and Enough is Enough. In collaboration with choreographer Karol Armitage, Joe co-wrote The Predator’s Ball, which premiered at the Maggio Musicale Festival in Florence, Italy, and enjoyed a subsequent run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In February 2007, the Dallas Lyric Theater presented the world premiere of The Winner, a musical co-written with Lewis Flinn about Lyndon Baines Johnson. Joe is a recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them fellowships from the New Jersey Arts Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Joe has also received the FDG/CBS playwriting award and New Dramatists’ Joe A. Calloway Award.
LARRY BLUMENFELD (Panel Moderator)’s writing about music and culture has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, The New York Times, and Salon, among other publications. He was a 2006-2007 Katrina Media Fellow for the Open Society Institute, researching cultural recovery in New Orleans, and a 2001-2002 Fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. His piece "Band on the Run in New Orleans" appears in Best Music Writing, 2008 (Da Capo Press, out next month), and his essay, “Exploding Myths in Morocco and Senegal,” appeared in Music in the Post-9/11 World (Routledge). He is editor-at-large of Jazziz magazine.
NICOLE BODE (Panelist) is an award-winning journalist at the New York Daily News, where she has covered local, national and international news since 2001. She is currently assigned to criminal justice issues, most recently covering the Sean Bell police shooting trial in Queens. Nicole returned to her hometown of New Orleans a day after Hurricane Katrina to cover the flood-ravaged aftermath for the newspaper. Her coverage of the journey home of an African American family one year after Katrina earned her the New York Association of Black Journalists’ 2007 News Award.
ROBERT CAREY (Panelist) has over 25 years of experience working in refugee resettlement and humanitarian advocacy and has served as Vice President for the International Rescue Committee’s Resettlement Department since March 1995. Although it typically focuses on humanitarian aid for victims of war and persecution, the IRC responded for the first time to natural disaster in the U.S. after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, dispatching an Emergency Response Team to Louisiana to provide support to local organizations in the areas of public health, emergency education, and mental health counseling for children and adults. In addition, the IRC's nationwide network of 22 resettlement offices offered relocation assistance to Hurricane Katrina evacuees: linking uprooted people to available housing and social services; providing such basic necessities as food, furnishings, and clothing; and helping with counseling, community orientation, job placement, and school enrollment.
LEE CLARKE (Panelist), a professor at Rutgers University, is the author of Mission Improbable and Worst Cases. His edited volume, Terrorism and Disaster: New Threats, New Ideas, was published in 2003. He is often invited to speak about leadership, culture, disaster, and organizational and technological failures; he consults with corporations, government agencies, and research foundations. One of Clarke's current projects, with Harvey Molotch of NYU, concerns how scientists negotiate the boundaries of science and politics. The project focuses on scientists whose work foretold, in various ways, the great harm that Katrina would bring to New Orleans. He is also researching and writing about the science and politics involved in the loss of the wetlands, which some believe can attenuate a storm surge, off the coast of Louisiana.
