Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Civic Ensemble completes this year's Civic Acts repertory with a World Premiere of Saviana Stanescu's Bee Trapped Inside The Window opening tonight at 8:30pm at the Black Box Theatre @ LACS, 111 Chestnut Street, Ithaca NY Juy 26 through 29. Stanescu's play, a Civic Commission, is a meditation on loneliness, identity and complicity that examines modern day domestic slavery's impact on the lives of three ethnically diverse women in the leafy suburbs of Connecticut. The production, directed by the actor/director Vernice P. Miller (All God's Chillun Got Wings), features Janilya Baizack, Sarah K. Chalmers (Slashes of Light), and Erin Lockett.

Civic Acts: New Plays Toward The Beloved Community is Civic Ensemble's new play festival in Ithaca featuring new political plays by nationally and internationally renowned playwrights whose work centers on women and people of color. These plays deal with the challenges our communities face in moving society toward what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called The Beloved Community. Civic Acts is one of the rare new play festivals in the United States devoted to socially-engaged theatre.

Four-time Emmy Award-winner Judy Tate's play Fast Blood kicked off the festival July 5-22. Fast Blood takes place in the antebellum South Enslaved Africans Effie and her mate Ham stumble across the body of a mysterious stranger who's been lynched but is still alive. Their connection to the hanged man begins a journey into their past and a trek from vengeance to justice; darkness into light. Fast Blood was produced in association with the American Slavery Project.

Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., an Artistic Director for Civic Ensemble along with Chalmers, says, "Bee Trapped Inside The Window brings the concerns of Fast Blood to the 21st century, especially when it comes to the complicity of the privileged in the face of oppression." According to Simmons, "Saviana asks the question: what would happen if we just connected deeply with one another? Perhaps deep connection between human beings is the beginning of an answer to some of society's more heinous abuses."

Stanescu was commissioned by the Cherry Arts to craft the monologue May from a previous project about human trafficking, as part of the Four Plays - 100 Years: A Celebration of Women's Suffrage festival last year at the Kitchen Theatre Company (KTC). The titular character of that monologue was an inspiration for Bee Trapped Inside The Window and appears in the play.

Saviana Stanescu is an award-winning Romanian-born playwright whose work has been widely presented internationally and in the United States. Aliens with extraordinary skills (Inmigrantes con Habilidades Extraordinarias) and Final Countdown (Cuenta Regresiva) ran for eight months in Mexico City at Teatro La Capilla and Teatro El Milagro. She has published books of poetry and drama, co-edited drama anthologies. Civic Ensemble has previously produced readings of her play Lenin's Shoe and the collaboratively written Dream Acts. She is a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre and a Usual Suspect with New York Theatre Workshop. She has served as Associate Artistic Director for Richard Schechner's East Coast Artists, Director of Eastern European Exchange for The Lark Play Development Center, curator of playgroundzero for undergroundzero festival of experimental theatre in NYC, and founder/president of Immigrant Artists and Scholars in New York (IASNY). She holds an MA in Performance Studies (Fulbright fellow) and an MFA in Dramatic Writing (John Golden Award for excellence in playwriting, shared with Rajiv Joseph) from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, where she was on faculty in the Drama Department for eight years, as well as a PhD in Theatre from National University of Theatre and Film, Bucharest, Romania. She has taught Playwriting and Performance Technique at Fordham University, Strasberg Institute for Theatre & Film, and Primary Stages – Einhorn School of Performing Arts (ESPA). Currently she is Assistant Professor of Playwriting and Theatre/Performance Studies at Ithaca College.

Vernice P. Miller is an educator and international theatre practitioner and currently an Adjunct Lecturer for the City University of New York at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where amongst the plays she has directed is the NY premiere of The Execution of Saint Luke by Steven Fechter. Her professional directing credits includes a five year developmental project with Pulitzer Prize winner, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis and Shakespeare and Company's founder Tina Packer; and a collaboration with Nobel Laureate the late Derek Walcott after he saw her direction of his play Pantomime for Payomet Performing Arts Center in Truro, Massachusetts. In 1995 along with Joann Maria Yarrow, Miller founded A Laboratory for Actor Training Experimental Theatre Company (ALAT) as a venue to further the work they began with Roberta Carreri at Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret in Denmark. Most recently for ALAT and in collaboration with Market Theatre Lab in South Africa she directed the workshop production of socio-cultural anthropologist Omotayo Jolaosho's Three Women (Break The Silence).

Rachel Russo serves as the Production Stage Manager for all of Civic Acts and Stage Manager for Bee Trapped Inside The Window, with Walter Chon as Dramaturg, Carrell Johnson as Costume Designer, and Cindy K. Greco as Graphic Designer.

All performances will take place at the Lehman Alternative Community School in Ithaca. Fast Blood was performed outside in the Maggie Goldsmith Amphitheatre and Bee Trapped Inside The Window will be in the Black Box Theatre. LACS has once again generously supported Civic Ensemble with subsidized space and time for rehearsals and performances, having previously hosted Civic Ensemble productions The Class Divide, She Persists: Women's Performance Workshop, and My Children! My Africa! as well as workshops with Civic Ensemble staff.

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