Announcing our Summer Play Lab Artists!
Sunday, July 9 at 4pm
LIVE at Ancram Opera House
1330 County Route 7, Ancram, 12502
Sunday’s performance is SOLD OUT! Thank you all for supporting the Summer Play Lab
We are thrilled to announce the selected Hudson Valley-based artists for the second installment of this year’s Play Lab Residency Program! Join us for a double-bill as we support the development of two innovative new performances, and showcase their incredible works-in-progress in an evening of artistic exploration:
Bullet by Seth McNeill: Delve into the depths of a solo play deconstructed through a hilariously failed TED talk. This thought-provoking piece unravels themes of depression, isolation, family trauma, and the internal struggle of artists finding their place in the world.
Cancer Cabaret by Emily Rubin, Maryann DeLeo, and Christine Koenig, with music by Michael Inge: Experience the transformative power of musical theatre as these artists, who are also cancer survivors, interpret life’s difficult moments and triumphs through song and storytelling.
Be a part of the artistic journey as these works evolve during our Play Lab Residency Program. Join us for an inspiring evening that challenges conventions and offers a unique perspective on the human experience.
BULLET
WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY SETH MCNEILL
DIRECTED BY PADRAIC LILLIS
In today's TED talk ... sorry, this is not a TED talk, though it might be for someone named Ted, so maybe it's Ted's Talk. But hopefully it will be for other people too. It's a talk that will hopefully mean something as it goes along. What do you say when you're not sure you have much to say? Who are you if you don't have much to offer?
A solo show in progress by a playwright <hopefully a person> in process.
MONODIALOGUE WORKSHOP WITH SETH MCNEILL
Saturday, July 8th 10am-12pm
LIVE at Ancram Opera House
The interruptions and self-contradictions in normal conversations and stream of consciousness can resemble an absurdist play when written down. Through free-writing exercises, discussion, and sharing of work, participants will begin to build delightfully inarticulate self-dialogues that reveal character in ways that a perfectly crafted monologue never could.
About the Artist
Seth McNeill is a playwright and theatre artist who says he grew up in Mississippi even though he was born in Alabama and his family lived other places too. He was homeschooled until college. His family once raised emus, and it did NOT go well.
His plays deal with isolation and social alienation, repressed generational trauma, and whiteness through a quasi-absurdist, darkly comic lens. He has presented his plays and
performed at the Valdez Theatre Conference, Gingold Theatrical Group, Fresh Ground Pepper, American Shakespeare Center, Dixon Place, Fault Line Theatre, Amios NYC, Bridge Street Theater, and the Hambidge Center. He has been named a semi-finalist for the O’Neill, the Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries Prize, and Primary Stages ESPA Drills. His short play Sad Lonely People will be published in Smith & Kraus’ Best 10-Minute Plays of 2023.
Seth has also worked as a script reader, educator, and dramaturg with Barrington Stage, Theatre for a New Audience, and Hunter College, where he received a Masters in Theatre. He was a frequent collaborator with Amios NYC, where he worked as a playwright, actor, director, literary manager, and producer for Shotz, a monthly short play festival, and is a current member of Howl Playwrights.
Seth lives with his wife Lori in a very old house in the Hudson Valley and is re-learning all of that carpentry stuff his dad taught him. www.sethmcneill.com
Padraic Lillis is the Founding Artistic Director of The Farm Theater. He directed Alex Riad’s The Wild Parrots of Campbell at The Cherry Lane Studio and In Place at Juilliard. Padraic directed the premieres of Adina Taubman’s The Road Back at The Chain Theater, Julia Brother’s I Was Right Here at the San Francisco Playhouse, Dipti Bramhandkar’s American Rookie at Luna Stage, Legrid Stephen’s A Perigrine Falls at The Wild Project, and Scott Hudson’s Sweet Storm for LAByrinth Theater Company. He was awarded: New York Innovative Theatre Outstanding Director for Lindsay Joy’s Rise and Fall of a Teenage Cyberqueen; and NY International Fringe Festival’s Overall
Excellence in directing for Lee Kaplan’s Bully, and Best Short at the Milan International Film Festival for his film Hand Over Hand. He was the Humana Visiting Scholar and Artist in Residence at Centre College. Padraic is the host of The Farm Theater’s Bullpen Sessions podcast. He is a member of the LAByrinth Theater Company and a lifelong Yankee fan.
CANCER CABARET
BY EMILY RUBIN, CHRISTINE KOENIG, AND MARYANN DELEO
WITH MUSIC BY MICHAEL INGE
Cancer Cabaret is a spoken word/musical theater work based on the breast cancer journals of writer/filmmaker Maryann De Leo, social work/activist/singer Christine Koenig, and author/writing instructor Emily Rubin. In heightened theatrics and song, three personal encounters with cancer from diagnosis to recovery are revealed. Fear, shock, and gallows humor are performed in collaboration with composer/singer Michael Inge. Cancer Cabaret demystifies the stigma and silences around the disease by exposing fissures of vulnerability, glimmers of hope, heightened body awareness, and ecstatic triumphs of healing when life and reality have been derailed by cancer.
WRITE TREATMENT WORKSHOP WITH EMILY RUBIN
Thursday, July 6th 3pm-5pm
LIVE at Ancram Opera House
The Write Treatment Workshops are a place where people affected by cancer can gather to process illness, as well as take a break from the rigors of treatment by exploring personal history through guided writing prompts.
The Write Treatment Workshops were created by Emily Rubin in 2011 after she completed treatment for breast cancer. This workshop will engage attendees in the craft of writing as a creative and therapeutic practice. While this workshop originated to engage cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers, attendees from all walks of life are welcome.
For this workshop, Rubin will share her story of cancer and writing, as well as writings of participants from the Write Treatment Anthology Vol. 1. The participants will also write from a prompt, and then share what they have written with the group.
About the Artists
Maryann De Leo is a documentary filmmaker. She has received numerous awards, including two Emmy Awards, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and a CableACE Award. De Leo’s work has premiered at the American Museum of the Moving Image and has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. De Leo was a recipient of an artist fellowship from NYFA. Her 2003 work, Chernobyl Heart, reveals the devastating effects of radiation on children after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl. The film won the 2004 Academy Award ® for Best Documentary Short. In 2008 DeLeo
returned to Chernobyl and directed White Horse, which aired on HBO and was shown at the Berlin Film Festival. De Leo’s film The People Will Decide, about the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, is in production. She is currently developing a film about mental illness and the crisis in health care. De Leo is also a writer. Her articles and essays have been published in Discover magazine, The Boston Globe, Wonderlust, Experience Magazine, and Poets and Writers blog. De Leo and Michael Inge started the Chelsea Mt. Sinai Singers Circle in 2017. De Leo is a singer with the Abrons Arts Center’s community chorus and sang in The Mile Long Opera and Antigone in Ferguson with Michael Inge and the chorus. De Leo completed Cornell’s Cooperative Extension Master Gardener program in Ulster County, N.Y., in 2018.
Christine Koenig was part of the performance art movement in downtown Manhattan in the early ’80s, working with such groups as the Sleazebuckets, the National Black Touring Company, and pioneer performance artists Diane Torr and Lizzie Olesker. Together, they developed the groundbreaking gender-bending piece, Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Queens winning the Downtown BACA award and performing in clubs and festivals around NYC. Koenig is a member of the Chelsea Vocal Ensemble at Mt. Sinai West Cancer Care Center. She is also an ensemble member of Never Too Old To Play at the Westbeth
Artist Community under the direction of Nancy Gabor and Paul Binnerts in residence with NYC’s Little Island storytelling festival. Koenig earned a BA degree from SUNY-Old Westbury in Community Organization and has a minor in Dance. She subsequently studied Dance at UC Berkeley. Koenig has a master’s degree in social work from Hunter College, where she was also a Fellow of the American Association of University Women. She served 18 years as the Associate Director of Youth Services and Director of Workforce Development at the Henry Street Settlement, founded in 1893.
Emily Rubin’s debut novel, Stalina (2011 HMH/Mariner Books), was a selection in the Amazon Debut Novel Award Contest. She received a NYSCA Literary Arts grant, the Sarah Verdone Writer’s Award, was finalist in the International Literary Awards, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She co-founded Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and
performance series in laundromats nationwide. Her short stories and essays have appeared in journals including Good Works Review, Litbreak, Confrontation, Poets & Writers, IceFloe Press, The Smart Set, and All the Restaurants in New York by John Donohue. She founded the Write Treatment Workshops for NYC and upstate New York cancer centers, and has lectured at Bard and taught fiction in Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Program. She is working on a novel about urban homesteading and lives in Columbia County, NY. http://emilyrubin.net
Michael Inge is a Virginia native and found his way to Nashville, where he honed his writing and performance skills at Belmont University. It wasn’t long before Michael became a major player in Nashville’s growing urban soul scene, where he learned to co-write with the best of them, collaborating
with #1-hit writers and other artists in Music City. As he continued to write and perform, Michael quickly became a regular session vocalist for writer demos, background vocals, and jingles—if it had words and needed a voice, he was on it. His first songwriting cut came while writing for his own project in Germany. Catch U If I Can was recorded by Haddaway on Coconut Records/edel music in 2005. Michael’s next cut was with Se7en (Korea’s Justin Timberlake) on the album 24/7 which reached number 1 in 2007. Other artists that have recorded Michael’s songs include Damien Horne, Jennifer Paige, Kelly King, and Abby Fender (Can You Duet). His songs have appeared on ABC (Lincoln Heights), NBC (Parenthood), CBC (Heartland, Peak Season), and The Family Channel (The Latest Buzz, Redline, American Violet). Michael is based in NYC, where he is writing and singing on various projects.
About the Play Lab Residency
The Play Lab project was designed to support theatre artists in cultivating innovative theatre to be presented in the future at AOH or elsewhere. Selected artists spend a two-month residency with AOH to bring their emerging pieces closer towards a fully realized production. Throughout the residency, AOH makes efforts to connect the artist with the community in meaningful ways. This year’s community events include a combination of interactive workshops, open rehearsals, and Q&A panels.