The Public Theater's UNDER THE RADAR Festival Presents INCOMING! at Joe's Pub, 8/23-24

INCOMING! The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival will present new work at Joe's Pub, The Public Theater's most intimate performance space, on August 23 and 24. INCOMING! offers emerging talent the freedom and flexibility to experiment with new material – sometimes for the first time – in front of a live audience. This year's lineup includes Obie winner Edwin Lee Gibson's Five ' Til, the Brooklyn-based theater company Lilac co's Drusi Is Coming and playwright Christina Anderson's Hollow Roots.

The INCOMING! initiative at Joe's Pub was created as an avenue for developing new material by artists looking for a safe, intimate performance space to debut work. "The Under the Radar Festival is proud to join with Joe's Pub in presenting the INCOMING! series," said UTR Artistic Director and Producer Mark Russell. "This is a forum where artists can develop new material in front of an audience. Sometimes a deadline is the best thing you can give an artist. INCOMING! is a deadline and a place for outrageous failures and new revelations! All live at one of the best rooms in the city. These are going to be some exciting performances."

Like Under the Radar, INCOMING! takes artists out of their comfort zones and challenges them to be ambitious in an environment known for its commitment to originality and innovation. "Joe's Pub is thrilled to work with our Public Theater colleagues to present these works-in-progress while keeping our prices low to encourage adventurous theater-goers, promote community engagement and support up-and-coming talent," said Joe's Pub Director Shanta Thake.

Tickets for all INCOMING! The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival @ Joe's Pub are just $10. The next Under the Radar Festival (UTR 13) will be held January 9-20, 2013 at The Public Theater. Artists that have debuted at INCOMING! followed by works produced at the official Under the Radar Festival include Lemon Andersen's County of Kings and Dael Orlandersmith's Stoop Stories.

INCOMING! The Public Theater'S UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL @ JOE'S PUB:

"Five ' Til" by Edwin Lee Gibson
Friday, August 23, 9:30pm, $10

Obie Award winning actor, Edwin Lee Gibson (The Seven) brings his commentary on capital punishment to Joe's Pub in the blues fairytale, Five ' Til. In a notorious state penitentiary in Huntsville, TX, cause and effect have come home to roost. Dante Wallace sits five minutes from execution for the murder of Kenya. What happens when a capital punishment case becomes about convicting someone rather than someone who is guilty? Five 'Til frames the complexity of a worst nightmare scenario into a "karmic tale" of how vengeance is far more powerful than a lethal injection. A lucid hallucination set to music, the play is a blues fairytale that captures both pain and joy in the stylistic traditions of Negro spirituals and soul. Edwin Lee Gibson has starred as Raqmaan in the NaRa Films feature Blood First (2012 release). He has also just completed his academic work, Freedom Initiative, which utilizes the canon of the late August Wilson as a means for revisiting and reimagining the American-African experience, post slavery, in the United States.

"Hollow Roots" by Christina Anderson
Saturday, August 24, 7:30pm, $10

In Hollow Roots, a woman traverses a nameless urban landscape plagued by a question: can a person of color have a "neutral narrative"? A spare and intimate setting evolves into a vivid world painted in detailed observations and marked by memories, music, history, candy, maps, and circumstance. Tapping into the rich and complicated genre of one person plays by writers such as Wallace Shawn and Spalding Grey, playwright Christina Anderson (Good Goods, Inked Baby), director Lileana Blain-Cruz (Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights) and performer April Matthis (Lear, The Sound and the Fury) interrogate the concept of cultural identity and ask "Can someone live a life unaffected by one's race or gender?"

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