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THIS JUST IN!

After its recent off-Broadway production, a new edition of 'NIGHT SKY' will be published by Samuel French at the end of 2009. Details TBA. This link will take you to the review by John Simon: Star-Gazing Prof Loses Language in Dark, Funny 'Sky': Review ...

 
 

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

 
 

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

 

 

ITALY! Susan Yankowitz and hub Herbert Leibowitz -- www.parnassuspoetry.com -- have both been selected as resident fellows at the Bogliasco Foundation near Genoa in March-April 2010, and in July-August will be teaching writing workshops in Assisi. For more information on the latter, go to www.artworkshopintl.com