The Lark's 2008-09 Season

The Lark in residency at

July 21 - 28
Sixteen Lark artists spent the week in a writers' retreat developing new work.
Playwrights included: Rob Ackerman, Chantal Bilodeau (w. lyricist Mindi Dickstein & composer Lisa DeSpain), Cheryl Davis, Hilly Hicks, Carson Kreitzer,
Jordan Seavey, Saviana Stanescu, Zohar Tirosh, and Aladdin Ullah.
Other artists included Catherine Coray, Hoon Lee, Alexandra Napier,
Sturgis Warner, and Jennifer Dorr White.

B e h a v e _Y o u r s e l f
by Leslie Ayvazian
directed by Daniella Topol

An explosive, sexy and dynamic ride that a housewife, her neighbor,
and her dominatrix teacher take with the men in their lives....

September 18 at 7pm

PLAYWRIGHTS’ WEEK 2008
September 22 - 28
presented in partnership with the Indo-American Arts Council
Justain Jain and Kittson O'Neill in WILDFLOWER by Lila Rose Kaplan
For Complete Festival Information, click here!
Will In Space
by Rogelio Martinez
directed by Lou Jacob

Lost astronauts. Heisenberg. Hypersensitive baby monitors.  Accelerated pregnancies.  And Will, a boy who is 8.6 years old and has not got a full night's rest ever since Pluto was kicked out of his solar system. This is Beth's world -- a world in chaos on the verge of collapse.

October 23 & 24 at 7pm

This Studio Retreat was part of

Presented in partnership with Primary Stages

Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theater
by Larry Tremblay
translated by Chantal Bilodeau

directed by Margarett Perry

John Wilkes Booth assassinates Abraham Lincoln during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington. Inspired by this historical fact, director Mark Killman hires two actors to reenact the presidential assassination through the comic characters of Laurel and Hardy. And he keeps for himself the role of Abraham Lincoln's wax figure. Why is Mark Killman interested in this political assassination? And who is hiding behind Abraham Lincoln's wax figure?

October 29 - 30 at 7pm

This Studio Retreat was part of


U.S. / Mexico Playwright Exchange Program
presented in collaboration with


November 14 - 24

The Lark hosts several Mexican playwrights in New York City for a ten-day
residency as part of an ongoing exchange between the U.S. and Mexico.


photography by Cutberto Garcia
For more information, click here
dance of desire: a music theater piece
based on Federico Garcia Lorca's YERMA and several of his poems
directed, conceived and edited for music theatre
by Kay Matschullat
music by Elizabeth Swados
adaptation/translation of Yerma & selected poems
by Caridad Svich
December 11 & 15 at 7pm
OLIVES AND BLOOD
by Michael Bradford
directed by May Adrales
A contemporary play about the murder of Spanish poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca.  The drama focuses on one of the murderers who stood on that dark hillside in 1936, who later bragged about his involvement, and his deluded attempt to silence the voice of a man by silencing his life.

In the end the murderer cannot help but realize that neither five bullets, an unmarked mass grave, nor thirty years of banning the works of Lorca had the power to still his voice.  Instead, it is the murderer, living and breathing in the world, who has become the voiceless, invisible one.
January 29 & 30 at 7pm




by Alfonso Cárcamo

translated by
Mariana Carreño King

directed by
Tamilla Woodard

With: Andres Munar* & Armando Riesco
Straight from our U.S/México Playwright Exchange! Decomposition tracks
the crumbling friendship of two Mexican men from different social classes. Ambivalent about their aspirations and struggling for meaning in their lives, they fistfight and find forgiveness with each other over the familiar territories of love and betrayal.

 The play's brilliance is compounded by its pervasive humor,
moments of grace, and a fascinating structure that allows actors to go in and out of character, inviting the audience to share the universality of friendship and survival.

Armando Riesco and Andres Munar

February
26– 28
@ 8PM

February 27/ 28
@ at 3PM
Andrea Wong, Tamilla Woodard, and
Alfonso Cárcamo discuss the play
photography by chantel cherisse lucier

Equity Approved Showcase
*Appear coutesy of Actors' Equity Association

this is not a torture
or an engine 
by erin marie bregman
directed by kara-lynn vaeni

A loose riff on the intersecting myths of Pandora and Prometheus. Fire is a gift, the ills of the world are prisoners, and mortals and immortals alike are caught in a bureaucratic nightmare. Soundscapes set this world into motion where silence means danger…and even gifts from the gods can be sold on the black market.
March 12 - 13 at 7pm

desire lines 
by ian rowlands
directed by Sturgis Warner

With a particular Celtic rhythm and wit, Desire Lines tracks the precarious life journey of one man from childhood and adolescence through adulthood and into old age.

Author Ian Rowlands, a leading playwright, director and producer in Welsh theater and television, has written this new work as part of a year-long residency at the Lark.

April 23 - 24 at 7pm


April 29 – May 9

by katori hall

On April 3, 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. retires to room 306 in the Lorraine Motel.  Through a humorous and irreverent hotel maid who visits him during the night, we see beyond the mythical icon to a man struggling with his place in a movement that will outlive him.


Jordan Mahome and Dominique Morisseau


Katori Hall

Equity Approved Showcase
*Appear coutesy of Actors' Equity Association

for a barbarian woman 
by Saviana Stanescu
directed by Paul Bargetto

The play interweaves a present-day love story between a Romanian woman and an American colonel from the NATO base in Constanta (a Romanian city at the Black Sea, built on the ruins of the ancient city TOMIS where the Roman poet Ovid was exiled sometime around year 8 AD) and a fictional relationship between Ovid and a Barbarian woman from Tomis.
a
public
reading
May 7 @ 7pm
Saviana Stanescu

puddy tat 
by lynn rosen
directed by giovanna sardelli

Paul Wells loves his job as a case worker. Molding downtrodden clients into well-adjusted, productive citizens keeps him satisfied. But when an unusual client begins to transcend his struggles in a way Paul can't, Paul's envy takes him down a road that threatens to devour his happiness and his humanity.
May 21 - 22 at 7pm

3 n d A n n u a l
P l a y w r i g h t s' W o r k s h o p
R e a d i n g s

Select writers develop new plays in Lark’s Playwright’s Workshop program,
created by Arthur Kopit and this year led byDavid Henry Hwang
and co-hosted by esteemed writers like Theresa Rebeck, Tina Howe, and Doug Wright.
For the 3rd year, the Lark presents this raw, in-progress work

June 8- a dram of drumchhicit,
a collaboration by Arthur Kopit and Anton Dudley
A Dram of Drumchhicit, a new work-in-progress, represents an unusual collaboration between Arthur Kopit and Anton Dudley. The play derives from a news account Mr. Kopit spotted in a Scottish tabloid several years ago, and which instantly captured his imagination.  The authors believe that saying anything more will give too much away.  Only the first act will be read.  That's how new this is.
June 9- the verizon play by Lisa Kron
A woman, driven crazy by Verizon customer service, endeavors to get even- or at least get her cell phone service turned back on.  Part thriller, part screwball comedy, part drawn from actual events that most likely have happened to YOU.
June 10- assisted living by Deirdre O'Connor
When a family crisis brings home old anxieties and new surprises, Jane begins to see the upside of not always being the grown up.
June 11- bereaved by Thomas Bradshaw
 When complications from a wealthy lawyer’s cocaine-induced heart attack prove fatal, she makes her husband promise to marry her best friend to function as mom for their son. Following her death, the family embarks on a drug-selling enterprise to make ends meet.
June 23- god of meat by Samuel D. Hunter
A video of insurgents beheading Jack Lewis has just been released over the Internet. Back home in Idaho, the only solution to his fundamentalist Christian family's grief--and his brother's
mounting spiritual crisis--lies in the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri.
PUBLIC
READINGS
June 8 - 11 and 23

behind the eye 
by carson kreitzer

directed by daniella topol

Vogue model. Surrealist muse. Combat photographer. Lee Miller lived several distinct and extraordinary lives, each to the fullest. Man Ray's lover and muse, her torso is familiar from some of his most arresting photos, and other pieces of her from other works (her lips floating above the skyline, her eye affixed to a pendulum...), but the story behind the enigmatic gaze is largely unknown. This is a woman who inhaled life like a swiftly-burning hand rolled cigarette, pausing only to flick the loose tobacco from her tongue. BEHIND THE EYE is a portrait of this beautiful, brave, magnetic, impossible woman.

Commissioned by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park

June 18 - 19 at 7pm
Carson Kreitzer
 
 

©2004 Lark Play Development Center