Richard Toth and Jenny Seastone Stern in Dreamless Land. Photo: Michael Schmelling.
Dreamless Land, written and directed by Julia Jarcho, will be the next offering from Richard Maxwell’s company the New York City Players, opening at the Abrons Arts Center on 4 November. Jarcho has been a long-time associate of Maxwell’s; the play “explores storytelling as a response to rootlessness in American culture,” according to the press release. For quite some time the New York City Players has specialized only in Maxwell’s own plays, but with this and the earlier Vision Disturbance (a play by Christina Masciotti that Maxwell directed at the Abrons Arts Center last year), the company is now featuring emerging writers who have sympathy with Maxwell’s own idiosyncratic reconception of realism and naturalism. “It’s important for new writers to have an extended network of collaborators,” Maxwell says. “It’s important for me, and for New York City Players, to provide the community that is needed to make a whole show, and to get new work out there in a really concrete way.” The play will run through 20 November; more information about the show is at the New York City Players Web site here, and tickets are available through theatermania.com here.
On the other side of the pond, the new Welsh company Pot of Thieves will present a world premiere of Howard Barker’s Five Names along with the one-act Slowly next Thursday, 6 October, at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre Studio. In the first play, directed by Phoebe Patey-Ferguson and Will Pritchard, characters from Penelope and Odysseus and Abraham and Sarah to a contemporary housewife “struggle against the circumscriptions of their identities and an eternal mortality”; Slowly, directed by Patey-Ferguson, is a “sharp and chilling exploration of sacrifice and individualism” in which “four imperial and chalkwhite women wrestle with their imminent fates at the hands of invading barbarians.” Tickets are available here; best of luck to this new company, which “seeks to produce radical text-based drama … emotionally highly charged, intellectually stimulating and politically pertinent.”
Finally — closer to home and rather more immediate — Matthew Freeman‘s new play, in the great expanse of space, there is nothing to see but More, More, More, in a production directed by the author, is having a three-performance workshop showing at The Brick in Brooklyn, opening tonight and running through Saturday 1 October. Over the past few years Mr. Freeman’s plays have been demonstrating a restless experimentation with form (his Brandywine Distillery Fire ran at the Incubator Arts Project last year to considerable critical acclaim); he will no doubt go further down that road with this one. Tickets here. Full disclosure: Matt interviewed me about my book Word Made Flesh for the New Books in Theatre podcast earlier this year.