News

NIGHT SKY: UPCOMING PRODUCTION
at the Globe Theatre, Odessa Texas, in repertory with KING LEAR and THE MIRACLE WORKER

Festival 2010 - September 2 - 19

King Lear
by William Shakespeare
Thankless children, mistaken judgments, major retirement mistake! Lear learns the hard way how to discern real love.

Night Sky
by Susan Yankowitz
Stunning, Moving beyond words. Night Sky explores the two remaining mysteries, the brain and the cosmos.

The Miracle Worker
by William Gibson
Basic integrity and emotional honesty are the strongest reasons that The Miracle Worker is so popular among audiences. A drama about the events that took place as Anne Sullivan began to teach deaf/blind Helen Keller better ways to communicate.

(The Globe is the only theatre of its kind in this country. It was built from 1959 – 1968 as a replica of The Globe in London during the time of Shakespeare. So it has an Elizabethan architectural stage and a large blue dome where the open air would have been. We also have seating rather than standing as is reflected in the more recent replica in London. www.globesw.org.)

NIGHT SKY: NEW PUBLICATION
Samuel French, Inc.
announces the revised version of
Night Sky

An extraordinary drama fresh from its recent Off-Broadway production, here's what the critics have to say about Night Sky...

"Susan Yankowitz's Night Sky is a rare thing: a play with a mind. It is also about the mind as universe, where language is internal astronomy. It shows us that more than hearts can be broken. ...The subject is astronomy. The subject is language. The subject is courage - and how all these fit together in a subtly patterned script of a life suddenly eclipsed by disaster. Don't miss this one." - Toby Zinman, Variety

"The enthralling Night Sky ... may be the accomplished Susan Yankowitz's best play yet. Her first-hand knowledge of aphasia and exemplary research into astronomy are breathtaking as she embraces an insight of Stephen Hawking's that the two abiding unsolved mysteries are the brain and the cosmos. ...(A) poetic and dramatic, serious and humorous, wise and profoundly moving play." - John Simon, Bloomberg News

"...A haunting, fascinating play, ...a must-see for the adventurous theater buff. The final word is like a signal - an unanswerable query released into the heavens." - Dan Hulbert, Atlanta Journal/Constitution

"Watching this American playwright weave a web which ultimately binds man and the cosmos is a breathtaking experience. The depth of Yankowitz' research enables her to spin wonderful metaphors, creating a masterpiece which entertainingly enlightens audiences. To sum it all up, Night Sky is a simply celestial theatre experience." - Pretoria News

"A sprawling, intensely interesting play with emotional urgency... an exploration of the whole nature of language, thinking, communication and the universe." - Aileen Jacobsen, New York Newsday

ABOUT THE PLAY
Night Sky

Susan Yankowitz

This extraordinary drama premiered to acclaim in a New York production directed by Joseph Chaikin and starring Joan MacIntosh. It was subsequently produced Off-Broadway in a revised version directed by Daniella Topol and featuring Jordan Baker in the central role.
Night Sky theatrically explores what Steven Hawking has called the two mysteries remaining to us: the brain and the cosmos. When she is hit by a car, the brilliant and articulate astronomer Anna loses her ability to speak, a condition known as aphasia. What emerges from her mouth is a hodge-podge of unconnected words alternately confusing, funny, original and wise -- and sometimes all four. In a series of brief, often comic episodes, the play follows Anna through her illness and ultimate acceptance of herself - a personal triumph, despite a continuing infirmity - and dramatizes the impact of her changed circumstances on her lover, her teen-aged daughter, and her professional life.


READ MORE / ORDER A COPY

Apply for performance rights
and order your copy of the script now at

samuelfrench.com

Seven

Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, Anna Deavere Smith and Susan Yankowitz
Documentary
Full Length
7 women: 7 total
Flexible Set

"Riveting, explosive, and inspiring drama…starkly emotive…reaffirm[s] the belief that one person could indeed make a difference."—Huffington Post. "It was impossible not to be inspired by the widely varying examples of courage that the project corralled." —Washington Post. "[A] coherent testimony of fundamental, frightening and shameful oppression of women all over the world—in the name of traditional economical, political and physical male power…It is an overwhelming experience to hear these women through the actors: brief, unsentimental, universal and personal. One cries. And becomes a little wiser." —Dagens Nyheter (Sweden).
Book/Item: SEVEN
Price: $7.50
ISBN/Code: 978-0-8222-2351-1
FEE: $75 per performance.

A collaboration of seven award-winning women playwrights, SEVEN is based on personal interviews with seven women leaders of the Vital Voices Global Partnership network who have triumphed over huge obstacles to create major changes in human rights in their home countries. In the seven interwoven stories we see the commonality of challenge and of bravery, and in the individual monologues that follow, we experience each fascinating whole true story.

Susan Yankowitz has written about Mukhtar Mai of Pakistan, an illiterate peasant woman who was gang raped by four men and forced to walk home almost naked in retribution for an alleged “honor crime.” Ms. Mai and her harrowing story grabbed headlines across the world. Instead of taking the traditional “women’s” route of committing suicide, she brought her rapists to justice, built schools to improve the condition of women, and became an advocate for education in her country.

SEVEN recently had performances in Deauville, France; Stockholm, Sweden; Washington, D.C.; Aspen, and London, England. It is currently on a long tour in Sweden.
Access this link for a rave account of the first New York performance on The Huffington Post by Marcia Yerman (www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-g-yerman/world-premiere-of-seve_b_83951.html)
Click to hear an interview with Susan Yankowitz, Carol Mack and Inez McCormack on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show or go to www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2008/01/18
For more information on this project, please go to www.seventheplay.com or contact rfreedmanagent@aol.com

SEVEN: recent and upcoming performances

The play was recently performed in Deauville, France; Stockholm, Sweden; Washington, D.C. and London, England, directed by Evan Yionoulis. Vital Voices and the Avon Foundation are bringing the play to India for the Vital Voices' India Summit in September 2010. It will tour Argentina later that fall and was just published by Dramatists Play Service and can be ordered at www.dramatists.com.

Chéri: New Release on Albany Records

Albany Records has just released highlights from Chéri, a musical drama based on the 1921 Colette novel with music by Michael Dellaira and a libretto by Susan Yankowitz. Written in a vernacular harmonic language, this new recording consists of selections from New York’s The Actors Studio Workshop production in 2005.
A work for the crossover territory of music-theatre and opera, Chéri is a musical love story in two acts that takes place in the Parisian demi-monde just before the first World War and dramatizes the doomed love affair between Léa de Lonval, a 49 year old ex-courtesan, and her lover of 7 years, the 23 year old Chéri. The story is comic and sad, poignant and ribald, serious and light-hearted, for where such barriers as class, race, or politics divide the lovers in works like La Traviata, West Side Story, South Pacific, Romeo and Juliet, or Tosca, Chéri is a bittersweet meditation on that moment when all persons “of a certain age” realize they have crossed the invisible meridian that separates their youth from what is left of their lives. www.albanyrecords.com

For a musical and vocal sample, go to www.michaeldellaira.com