Help by Claudia Rankine at The Shed, March 10-April 5th!

I thrilled to be working as a dramaturg with poet and playwright Claudia Rankine on her new play HELP, which runs at The Shed March 10-April 5. The whole team is super talented and amazing!! Director Taibi Magar, actress Roslyn Ruff, choreographer Shamel Pitts, set designer Mimi Lien, composer Jerome Ellis, costume designer Dede Ayite, and sound designer Mikaal Sulaiman. I feel so grateful to be in the room everyday!

This show is unlike anything I have ever worked on our heard about and will be SO POWERFUL.

Get your tickets here!

From The Shed:

“I write to provoke dialogue and to transform how we think about what it means to live and breathe in the world.”

—Claudia Rankine

Acclaimed poet and playwright Claudia Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric, The White Card) examines the nature of white male privilege in Help, a powerful new play commissioned by The Shed.

Roslyn Ruff (Theater: Fairview; Film: Marriage Story; TV: Divorce, Pose) stars as the Narrator, who recounts Rankine’s real-life conversations with white men that take place in transitional spaces like airports. As the stories unfold through monologues and staged scenarios, with Ruff supported by a cast of white male actors and dancers, Help explores how these conversations can go right, wrong, or raise new questions.

Directed by Obie Award-winner Taibi Magar (Is God Is, Soho Rep), Help builds on Rankine’s ongoing investigation into whiteness, elements of which were shared in her recent, widely read New York Times Magazine essay, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.”

Rankine’s body of work, for which she has been awarded MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, crosses lyric poetry and prose essay to navigate questions of race, healthcare, loneliness, and what it means for a life to matter in American society today.

Recommended for ages 14 and up; includes adult language and content around white supremacy, racism, and misogyny

Interview in The Brooklyn Rail about O, Earth

I talked to playwright Susan Soon He Stanton for an interview in The Brooklyn Rail. It was a great conversation! 

"Rail: Something that strikes me in your writing and in your performance art is your relationship with theatricality and intimacy.

Llewellyn: I think those are the things I care about. Maybe they are one thing. Theater is intimacy. I’m obsessed with the audience. I’m obsessed with being in a room together, and being in a group in a room together with whatever a play or a theater experience is—or a work of art that is physicalized. It’s connected to everything to me. This art is something that can only be experienced when we breathe all the same air in the same room. The relationship with the audience is what makes theatricality. If you are in an audience, you want something to happen to you. I don’t want to watch someone else’s story. I’m obsessed with where the audience is in the story and what their experience is. I don’t just want to tell a story and have other people witness it. I’m trying to create work that will allow people go through an experience together."

Read the full interview here.

Tickets on Sale Now for O, Earth! $15 in 2015!

Get your tickets now for O, EARTH!

Performances January 23rd-February 20th, 2016

O, Earth

By Casey Llewellyn

Directed by Dustin Wills

With:

Moe Angelos, Jess Barbagallo, Ato Blankson-Wood, Emily Davis, Cecilia Gentili, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Tommy Heleringer, Mizz June, Martin Moran, and Kristen Sieh.  

Portia DeRossi stares into the soft light of her refrigerator and wonders if she’ll ever be truly happy; Our Town’s Emily and George venture into the unknown; Thornton Wilder digs in search of a time capsule he buried under the stage long ago; Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are jettisoned from the world of the dead, curious to discover what’s happened in the world they left..

O, Earth floods the stage with a panorama of characters from gay popular culture, theatre history, and radical New York City, to ask how we live as ourselves and in communion with others. An interrogation of the "universal," Casey Llewellyn's epic play imagines the boundless possibilities within everyone, every day.

2015 Ticket Discount is $15, if you buy them in 2015, for the first 15 performances!

Use code: 15for15

O, Earth Cast Announced!

We're cast! OMG! These people are SO beautiful.

Cast of O, Earth from left to right: Moe Angelos (Ellen Degeneres), Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Stage Manager), Martin Moran (Thornton Wilder), Kristen Sieh (Emily), Tommy Heleringer (Duncan), Jess Barbagallo (George), Emily Davis (Portia De Rossi), Cecilia Gentili (Sylvia Rivera), and Mizz June (Marsha P. Johnson). And Ato Blankson-Wood was out of town when this picture was taken, but he's playing Spencer.

I'm so in love with these amazing artists! 

The Creative Team and Crew are also amazing! Dustin Wills is directing, Kate Attwell and The Foundry Theatre are everything, Adam Rigg is designing the set, Montana Blanco is designing the costumes, Barbara Samuels is designing the lights, Raphael Mishler is designing the props and Janie Bullard is designing the sound! Amanda Feldman is the Line Producer, Jeff Drucker is the Production Manager, Nicole Marconi is the Production Stage Manager and Andrea Berkey is the Assistant Stage Manager!

O, Earth Production Dates Announced!

O, Earth, the play I'm writing for The Foundry Theatre, will run January 23rd-February 20th at HERE. Here is a quote from the production announcement on Broadway World:

A contemporary epic, O, Earth brings a panorama of characters to the stage: Our Town's Emily, George, Simon Stimson, the Stage Manager and Wilder himself join historical LGBTQ icons Gertrude Stein, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as well as Ellen DeGeneres and Portia DeRossi. In this play's ever expanding universe, Llewellyn invites the audience to consider the ways we organize our togetherness.

Read the rest of the announcement here.