Theater: Peace for Mary Frances, The New Group, 2018

PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES
By Lily Thorne
Directed by Lila Neugebauer

Scenic Design Dane Laffrey, Costume Design Jessica Pabst, Lighting Design Tyler Micoleau, Music and Sound Design Daniel Kluger

Mary Frances has lived a good life; she's ninety years old and ready to die. Born to refugees fleeing the Armenian genocide, her last wish is to die peacefully at home surrounded by her family. Her dream collides with reality as three generations of explosive women flood her small New England home to battle for their family’s legacy. Mary Frances must navigate the volatile relationships of the children she raised -- or die trying. Lois Smith stars as a tenacious survivor, struggling to break the bonds that tie her to this life. Directed by Lila Neugebauer, Lily Thorne’s Peace for Mary Frances is a wrenching and caustically funny portrait of an American family in crisis.

Theater: Time’s Journey Through a Room by Toshiki Okada, 2018 NYC

Time’s Journey Through a Room is set one year after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. This intimate, multi-layered play observes how hope can spring up alongside sadness and fear, and change can be realized if we are awake to the present moment.

Written by
Toshiki Okada
https://chelfitsch.net/en/

Translated by
Aya Ogawa

Directed by
Dan Rothenberg

Featuring:
Maho Honda
Yuki Kawahisa
Kensaku Shinohara

Set Design:
Anna Kiraly

Costume Design:
Maiko Matsushima

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiki_Okada :

Okada focuses on connecting to his audience's sense of alienation by separating speech and movement in his plays. Okada's hyperrealistic style is often referred to as "super real Japanese," which draws influence from Oriza Hirata's "quiet theater" movement from the 1980s.
His works are distinguished by the use of fragmented and abbreviated idiosyncratic language in the vernacular of Japanese in their twenties, which is deliberately inarticulate, drawn out, and circular. 
...
Okada believes that his actors should be able to manipulate their consciousness and balance their attention on both their words and movement. The gap between language and the body is the lived experiences each performer gathers from their environment to bring to their performances, and they use the external body to reflect those lived experiences or "images." Okada advises his actors to not be overly attached with the language or the physicality of the performance so that the audience can interpret the "image," themselves. Actors are one single entity to the image; in addition, Okada uses "the performance's disjointed elements of language, movement, design, music, and more" to signify the "image" in his plays.

Theater: Replay, Nicola Wren

REPLAY

Written and performed by Nicola Wren
Directed by George Chilcott
DugOut Theatre

Featuring the voices of Will Brown, Tanya Kraljevic, and Mark Weinman

When a fiercely independent, workaholic police officer receives an old cassette tape with a message from her big brother on it, she is propelled back to her vibrant childhood and forced to confront a tremendous loss.

Replay is an intimate, moving, and life-affirming story about learning to celebrate the past, however painful.

Film: Columbia University Film Festival 2018 (CUFF)

Three Nights and a Goat (Tres Noches y una Cabra)
An unexpected arrival sets off a war between two neighboring families.

Director: Nicolas Becerra
Writer: Ben Gottlieb

Talent Night at Auschwitz: Bunk Five
After he survives a shocking trauma, a 14-year-old boy retreats to his flamboyant imagination, a dark and glittering dreamworld. His fortress becomes a prison as memories refuse to stay buried in the sand.

Writer/Director: Max Rifkind-Barron
Producer: Alex Peace

Del Rio
A young mother separated from her daughter during a border patrol raid on the US/Mexico border struggles to make her way back to her daughter.

Director: Raj Trivedi
Writer: Raj Trivedi

The Bee
McKenzie is preparing for an important spelling bee. Just days before the bee, she grows increasingly insecure about her eyebrows. When her mother won't allow her to get them threaded, McKenzie takes matters into her own hands.

Director: Keenon Nikita
Writer/Producer: Alexandria Ashley

Knights in Newark
Armed with her vivid imagination, a young girl completes a secret project on the roof of her apartment building to protect her family from a dreaded curse brought upon by the Knights in Newark.

Director: Nic Yulo  
Writer/Producer: Christopher Abeel

One Sunny Day
On Ross’ 14th birthday, he wishes for his lifelong dream of watching the sunrise on a beach. But this is a lofty aspiration for Ross, who suffers from xeroderma pigmentosum—a rare genetic disorder that makes his skin intolerable to ultraviolet light.

Writer/Director: Minjae Chang
Writer/Producer: Elliot Zarrabi

Everything's Fine: A Panic Attack in D Major
A musical comedy about a woman at the onset of her quarter-life crisis and her existential journey through the various stages of anxiety in song and dance.        

Writer/Director: Zack Morrison    
Producer: Taylor Ortega    
Cast: Carly Blane, Derek Klena, Tait Rupert, Chelsea Watts, Alyson Reim, Elise Vannerson, Lauren Luciano

Tail End of the Year (年尾巴)
On Chinese New Year Eve, ten-year-old Yang Lan is anxiously waiting for her singer mother to come home. While her big family is celebrating loudly with Mahjong, fireworks, dinner, and laughs, she struggles to reconcile her urge to feel, at least for a brief moment, loved.

Writer/Director: Chieh Yang
Producer: Yu Yen Cheng  

Green
An undocumented Turkish pedicab driver unwittingly draws police attention, endangering his brother, his community, and himself.

Writer/Director: Suzanne Andrews Correa
Writer/Producer: Mustafa Kaymak

Happy Mask
A man suffering from depression is given a mysterious happy mask that allows him to keep up a cheerful appearance. However, is the smile genuine?

Director: Yi Liu      
Writer: Yi Liu, Sarah Abdulla
Producer: Luca Marcovici  

Horizon
To realize her dream of discovering uncharted space, a determined female astronaut must choose to leave her humanity behind.  

Writer/Director: Nic Yulo    
Producer: Mahak Jiwani    

Saturno
After her brother is killed in a drug bust operation, a guilt-stricken Luna begins to see his spirit and struggles to make meaning of his appearances to help him find peace.

Director: Bianca Catbagan
Writer: Chantel Clark

Curandera
Maruja, an Andean woman with mystical powers, works at a household where a little girl never seems to stop acting out her rage. Being able to see the images that haunt the little girl's mind, Maruja decides to try to heal her with the help of a special brew.    

Director: Mauricio Rivera Hoffmann
Writer: Mauricio Rivera Hoffmann
Cast: Magaly Solier, Danaya Sladkov, Katerina D’Onofrio  

Theater: Operation Crucible @ 59E59, Brits Off-Broadway 2018

OPERATION CRUCIBLE

By Kieran Knowles

Directed by Bryony Shanahan

With Salvatore D'Aquila, Kieran Knowles, Christopher McCurry, and James Wallwork

"Sheffield was on fire. It was glowing orange, like hell, like a furnace, like steel."

On the December 12, 1940, during World War II, a single bomb reduced the Marples Hotel, which stood proudly in Fitzalan Square in Sheffield, from seven stories to just 15 feet of rubble. Only one of the ten compartments in the hotel's cellars withstood the blast. Trapped within it were four men.

This is their story, from beginning to end...

"A SMASHING FIRST PLAY BY KIERAN KNOWLES... A CAST OF EXACTLY FOUR, ON A NEAR NAKED STAGE, MANAGED TO SUMMON THE ENORMITY OF THE SHEFFIELD BLITZ."
- Ben Brantley, The New York Times

★★★★ "GORGEOUSLY POETIC...THESE MEN AND THEIR STORIES STAY WITH YOU."
- The Stage

Music: The Future is Bright, Elliot Cole, Peter Ferry and the NYU Percussion Ensemble, May 7, 2018

The NYU Percussion Ensemble performed a portrait concert of music by Elliot Cole featuring:

soloist Peter Ferry on the new multimedia concerto The Future Is Bright, Cole performing his bardic tale Hanuman's Leap, and a premiere of a new piece for 75 flowerpots.

Program:

Flowerpot Music (NYU Book)

Paths

Postludes 1

Juniper

Postludes 2

Bells

Beehive

Postludes 4

The Future is Bright (film by Jodie Mack)

Hanuman's Leap

Film: RBG, 2018

At the age of 84, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has developed a breathtaking legal legacy while becoming an unexpected pop culture icon. But without a definitive Ginsburg biography, the unique personal journey of this diminutive, quiet warrior's rise to the nation's highest court has been largely unknown, even to some of her biggest fans - until now. RBG is a revelatory documentary exploring Ginsburg 's exceptional life and career from Betsy West and Julie Cohen, and co-produced by Storyville Films and CNN Films.

Genre:
Documentary
Directed By:
Betsy West, Julie Cohen

Film: Becoming Who I Was (2018) documentary

In northern India's sparsely populated and mountainous Ladakh region, an impoverished young boy is discovered to be the reincarnation of an esteemed, high-ranking Tibetan monk. Born displaced from his original monastery in Tibet, the boy is denied his rightful place. Amid growing doubts and mounting expectations in the community, the boy and his elderly godfather embark on a gruelling, improbable trek across India to return the young monk-to-be to his rightful monastery before it becomes too late.

Genre: Documentary
Directed By: Chang-Yong Moon, Jin Jeon

Theater: Seed Folks, starring Sonja Parks at The New Vic, NYC 2018

Performed by: Sonja Parks
Directed by: Peter C. Brosius
Children's Theatre Company, Minneapolis, MN

Based on the book by Newbery Medal-winning author Paul Fleischman, Seedfolks tells the story of a neighborhood brought together by one small girl planting seeds in an abandoned lot. We sat down with award-winning actress Sonja Parks, who brings to life each and every resident of Gibb Street.

Sonja Parks on Creating Each Character in SEEDFOLKS (excerpt from https://www.newvictory.org/Blog/April-2018/Sonja-Parks-Seedfolks):

Why do you think theater is important at this moment in time?
Theater teaches us how to empathize with one another. When we go to the theater, we exist in the same space together, watching other human beings navigate their problems and challenges. Often, we discover that the things we think divide us, really unify us—our insecurities, faults and places where we fall short. When we're able to connect with another person, it's harder to dismiss their humanity.  

What's the most memorable audience reaction you've seen to Seedfolks?
There's one moment in the show where I introduce two audience members to each other. One night, I noticed a little girl who was sitting in the front row. She was so sweet and so involved in watching the show that I couldn't ignore her! I went up to her and asked her name. She hesitated for a few seconds and then, quite seriously, said, "My name is Princess Sonja." The whole audience laughed and I, too, had to stifle a smile. I said, "It's so nice to meet you, Princess Sonja. Would you mind coming with me for a minute?" After checking with her father, she took my hand.
I noticed an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair sitting far-stage right. I took Princess Sonja over to him and asked the gentleman his name. "My name is Saul," he said. I replied, "Nice to meet you, Saul. Saul, this is Princess Sonja." Without missing a beat, the little girl jumped into his lap and gave him a big hug. "Hi Saul!" she screamed. The gentleman was surprised for a second, but then he hugged her right back and said, "Hi, Princess." There was a collective "awwww" from the audience. I gently disentangled the Princess from the gentleman and took her back to her parents.
When people drop their guard and exist in a moment with one another, that's when the real theater magic can begin!

https://www.parentmap.com/article/show-and-tell-scts-seedfolks-one-woman-masterpiece