On Monday, November 15, 2010, the Writer's Guild of America, East Foundation will host a benefit performance of Jules Feiffer: Funny Side Up. The benefit performance will be held at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, at 8:00 pm. Tickets are now on sale for the performance and are priced at $100 through Telecharge (www.telecharge.com). VIP Orchestra seating, which includes a pre-show reception with Jules Feiffer and other celebrities, is $250. Discounted tickets are available for mezzanine seating. All proceeds will benefit the Writer's Guild of America, East Foundation.
Funny Side Up is a ninety-minute autobiographical tour of the life of celebrated author and cartoonist Jules Feiffer. In it, Feiffer will take the audience through his extraordinary career using a slideshow of comic strips, both his own and his contemporaries and the masters who inspired him as a boy. He will also highlight some of his artwork that has never before been shown in public. Feiffer has specially crafted his solo performance for this benefit and it will be the first time he has performed it in New York! The evening is a one-of-a-kind celebration of one of the great artistic lights of New York City. A brief question and answer session will follow the presentation.
Jules Feiffer's Pulitzer-winning comic strip ran for 42 years in the Village Voice as well as 100 other papers. He is the author of the Obie-award winning Little Murders, the screenplay for the film Carnal Knowledge and Oscar-winning animated short, Munro. Through his use of biting humor and illustrations over the past six decades, Feiffer has graphically captured American social change and cultural mood. He has also made us laugh and laugh as we've found ourselves and our politicians at his mercy.
As a playwright, Feiffer also wrote the Tony-nominated Knock Knock and Grown-Ups. As a novelist, he wrote Harry, the Rat with Women and Ackroyd. He has also illustrated numerous books including Which Puppy? by his daughter Kate and the children's classic The Phantom Tollbooth. He has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Academy Award and the Venice Film Festival award for best screenplay. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995 and inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004.
Most recently, Feiffer's autobiography, Backing Into Forward was published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
Honorary chairpersons for the benefit performance of Jules Feiffer: Funny Side Up are: Alan Arkin, Candice Bergen, Kristen Chenoweth, Paul Dooley, Art Garfunkel, Elliott Gould, John Guare, Sheldon Harnick, Hugh Hefner, Bill Irwin, Robert Klein, Arthur Kopit, John Lithgow, Emily Mann, Bill Moyers, Richard Nelson, Mike Nichols, Oliver Platt, Stephen Schwartz, Stephen Sondheim, Gay & Nan Talese and Robin Williams.
Tickets for the November 15th benefit performance are on sale now through Telecharge, www.telecharge.com. Normal service charges apply to phone and Internet orders. All prices include a $2 facility fee. All proceeds will benefit the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation.
The Writers Guild of America, East Foundation is the charitable foundation of the Writers Guild of America, East. The WGAE Foundation is an organization of top professional writers in the country who volunteer their writing skills in the service of underserved populations. During the last few years, the Foundation has been especially active and vital. It has developed writing workshops in Ohio and Texas for military veterans; started book clubs that bring celebrity performers and celebrated writers to underserved schools where they read aloud from favorite texts and promote their enthusiasm for literature; partnered with the Screen Actors Guild Foundation in a program called PencilPals that develops relationships between working writers and grade school students who have writing ambitions, and funded the Baltimore Sun fellowship program. In addition, it awards the Michael Collyer Fellowship in Screenwriting and has cooperative ventures with the ScenariosUSA organization and The Free Speech Leadership Group. One of its next projects will be a writing workshop with public school teachers in Detroit.
