O Earth makes Broadway World's 11 Superb New Theatrical Experiences from 2016 list /  by Casey Llewellyn

"The Foundry once again dropped a woke-bomb on our hurting world with Casey Llewellyn's ambitious fantasia on contemporary queerness. The deeply moving play put a rainbow of queer characters in a flexible and timeless world of dirt and doors (impeccably designed Adam Rigg) to dialogue on the queer. The central lovers of Our Town (innocently and passionately enacted by Kristen Sieh and Jess Barbagallo) run away and meet Ellen Degeneres (Moe Aneglos, an enthusiastic dead ringer) and Portia DeRossi (Emily Davis in one of the year's most intricately layered performances) while Thornton Wilder (a soulful Tommy Heleringer) befriends a whale: all under the watch of The Stage Manager (Donnetta Lavinia Grays showing dutiful authority) who is getting tired of telling stories "about these white people." Llewellyn's many threads organically meld to become an essential conversation with a diverse and spectacular ensemble."

See the full list here. 

O, Earth makes Advocate's Top Ten New York Theater of 2016 /  by Casey Llewellyn

"7. O, Earth
Using commingling characters like Sylvia Rivera and Ellen DeGeneres, Casey Llewellyn put an inspired and inspiring queer twist on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, playfully examining our community’s history and other universal mysteries. With fearless director Dustin Wills and a largely LGBT cast that included Moe Angelos and Jess Barbagallo, Foundry Theatre’s ambitious world premiere was almost too wonderful for anybody to realize it."

Wait, no one realized it? Like life? #ThingstochalkuptoanOurTownreference

I Am Bleeding All Over the Place: A Living History Tour, my collaboration with Brooke O'Harra, got an honorable mention too! 

See full list including many friends here!

I curated Little Theatre at Dixon Place for HOT! Come see the work of 5 amazing artists! /  by Casey Llewellyn

I had the honor of curating the HOT! Festival edition of Little Theatre at Dixon Place. The show is this coming Monday, July 11th at 7:30pm! Get your tickets now for this auspicious coming together of queer and trans brilliance!

Fresh off a reading of his CROOKED PARTS at National Black Theatre, visionary playwright Azure D. Osborne-Lee presents new work! Recently seen at Everybooty, Queer Memoir, and as Sylvia Rivera in O, EARTH, genius of storytelling that creates space for us all, Cecilia Gentili has something real, hilarious and life-affirming for us! If you cannot wait for another experience of Nia Witherspoon's brilliance after her gorgeous play THE MESSIAH COMPLEX at BRIC recently or if you missed it, this is your chance. This is your night! The one and only Queen Princess Carter will floor you with her channeling, her moves, and the raw power of her performance! This femme will be taking notes! And while we've all been here wondering what our lives are in 2016, Virginia Grise has been all over the country with her work while still making time for the book club where I got to know and love her. She's opening a show SHE-SHE-SHE at ICE Factory later this month, and she'll be showing a bit of a show she premiered earlier this year on Monday, YOUR HEALING IS KILLING ME. We all need this. I am SO EXCITED by the work of these incredible artists! I hope you can join us for this one-night-only HOT! Festival specialness.

Come tonight!

YOUR HEALING IS KILLING ME
written and performed by Virginia Grise
directed by Emily Mendelsohn

One artist’s reflection on living with post-traumatic stress disorder, near-blindness, ansia, testosterone and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and kickstarter funded self-care. Based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists. Part performance, part lecture, part therapy (cuz her insurance doesn't cover it) this performance manifesto is unprocessed, gluten and guilt free. Because Capitalism is toxic and The Revolution is not in your body butter.


VECTOR
new work by Azure D. Osborne-Lee

Q: What's the difference between rabbits and hares?
A: Who picks up the pieces when a virus runs amok.


A PERFORMANCE
by Cecilia Gentili

Originally from Argentina, Cecilia worked at the LGBT Center, Apicha CHC and currently serves as the Assistant Director of Public Affairs at GMHC. She was a contributor to Trans Bodies Trans Selves and is a board member at Translatina Network. That's for work. For fun, she acts sometimes and loves doing storytelling events where she talks about her life experiences and she cooks amazing brunches for her friends on the weekends. She is very passionate about advocating for her community, and mostly for transgender women with a Latino background, sex work history, drug use and incarceration history.


THE BEAUTY OF PRINCESS CARTER
created and performed by Princess Carter

Are you ready to be entertained?


A READING from SHE
by Nia Witherspoon

performed by Tanisha Thompson, Kirya Traber & Nia O. Witherspoon

All this and more on
Monday, July 11, 2016 — 7:30 p.m.
@ Dixon Place
161A Chrystie btw. Delancey & Rivington
(F/V 2nd Ave; 6 Bleecker; JMZ Bowery)

Tickets $18 @ the door but just $15 online, in advance
(http://dixonplace.org/performances/little-theater-at-dixon-place/); students & seniors $12
 
1st come, 1st served, no reservations ('less you buy yr. tix online)
For more information, call (212) 219-0736, or browse www.dixonplace.org

I Am Bleeding All Over the Place! This June! Collaboration with Brooke O'Harra! /  by Casey Llewellyn

I'm co-writing a piece with Brooke O'Harra that she conceived, and I'm really excited about! It runs June 16-26th at La Mama, and it's part of ongoing project exploring The Audience. The cast and team are amazing! Erin Courtney, Kristin Kosmas and Heidi Schreck wrote scenes for it. Brendan Connelly made the music for it. Becca Blackwell, Jane Bradley, Hye Young Chyun, Sharon Hayes, Laryssa Husiak, Anna Kohler, Zavé Martohardjono, Greg Merhten, Alexander Paris, and Tanya Selvaratnam are acting in it! 

Buy tickets and read more about the project here!

Support the show happening and everybody getting paid here!

Brooke's words:

"As a director, I think about the audience a lot. Wondering what they're thinking, wishing they would do different things, come somewhere else with me, the tour is part of a continued attempt to collaborate with the audience in a direct way to understand the nature of the relationship at the heart of performance and make something new together. Take the tour.

"I’m Bleeding All Over the Place: A Living History Tour is presented by La Mama E.T.C. and premiers this June – very soon! …A Living History Tour is the latest component of an ongoing project called: I’m Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in Directing or Nine Encounters Between Me and You. Delving into the emotional landscape of everyday conflict, this work examines how gender and sexuality, narrative and story, conflict and resolution, relate and come to form in the dynamic space between the audience and the performer."

Interview in The Brooklyn Rail about O, Earth /  by Casey Llewellyn

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.

 

O, Earth is a Time Out New York Critic's Pick! /  by Casey Llewellyn

"One of the loveliest things—in an absolute avalanche of lovely things—about Casey Llewellyn's wide-ranging piece is her title. In calling it O, Earth, Llewellyn quotes from the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, when Emily's overwhelmed spirit exclaims, “Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” This is not so surprising; Llewellyn's postmodern pop-threnody takes Wilder's masterpiece as its matter and prime mover. But the playwright also reflects the fragment through a prism. Written in just that dropped-h way, Llewellyn's title also harkens to Jeremiah (“O, earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord”); say the phrase, you hear the echoes. Llewellyn hides an encompassing lamentation in the words that even Wilder, past master of heartbreak, didn't amplify.

Is that a lot to pin on a title? Not if you see the play itself, which is confident, lyrical, hilarious, unabashedly literate and unapologetically political. It also holds the Wilder text as gently as a robin's egg." --Helen Shaw

Wow! Thanks Helen Shaw for this amazing review! Read the whole thing here. And get your tickets before they're gone!