Twentysomethings Wonder What It's All About in Off-Off-Bway's Quiet Homily, June 8-10
By Kenneth Jones
08 Jun 2003
A young Manhattan troupe called The Imperfect People Theater Company presents its inaugural production, A Quiet Homily, a new play by Michael Edison Hayden, 8 PM June 8-10 at manhattantheatresource.
The Imperfect People Theater Company is a collective founded by twentysomethings J.T. Dorr-Bremme (producer), Michael Edison Hayden (playwright) and Matt Urban (director).
The three met in their early days at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. In their junior year, Hayden finished his first full-length play, Imperfect People. Impressed by his work, Dorr-Bremme and Urban submitted it to Tisch's GAP Board and received a spot in the fall 2000 season. A year and a half later, they presented a reading of Hayden's play, Mamma's Boy, in the café at WestBeth Theatre Center. This production of A Quiet Homily is their first under the "official" auspices of The Imperfect People Theater Company.
A Quiet Homily is a portrait of two young men, Tom and Warren, and their search for relief from Manhattan's corporate ladder. The young men travel to Maine on Memorial Day weekend, where they rendezvous with two affluent girls, Cynthia and Lee, from the Virginia suburbs. Cynthia and Tom struggle with their own private delusions and the daunting task of moving their relationship forward, while Warren and Lee attempt to overcome their own past disappointments to discover each other. Upon returning to New York, Tom and Warren struggle with the prospect of work life, having placed their lives "in the context of an immeasurably vast, and often-hostile universe," according to the company announcement.
"This is not a coming-of-age story, where characters tie up their psyches in neat little packages," said director Matt Urban. "It's an intelligent, language-driven play that genuinely and seriously asks the questions: 'What is valuable in life?' And once you have decided that: 'How will you choose to live your life?'"
Hayden is a 24-year-old playwright from Long Island. Urban is a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where he studied directing at Playwrights Horizons Theatre School (PHTS), and has staged a number of Off-Off-Broadway productions. Dorr-Bremme has appeared in a wide variety of Off-Off-Broadway shows, most recently in HERE's American Living Room series as Melvin in Loving Evolving, a new play by James Shubert. He is also the executive producer for the Imperfect People Theater Company, a fight choreographer, web designer, and theatrical jack-of-all-trades. He holds a BFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
The non-Equity Homily cast includes Haley Channing, J.T. Dorr-Bremme, Daniel Kipler, Eileen Little, Hondo Weiss-Richmond and Gretchen Witt.
Designers are Jessie Gallogly (set and costumes), Ben Fox (lighting).
Tickets are $10. Performances are 8 PM June 8-10 at manhattantheatresource, 177 MacDougal Street. For ticket information, call (212) 501-4751. *
A Quiet Homily is part of the manhattantheatresource "FlopNight Development Series."
For more information, visit imperfectpeople.com or theatresource.org.
"FlopNights," drawing on the idea of flophouses (cheap digs for poor or itinerant folk), are at the heart of the mission of manhattantheatresource, which operates a 55-seat space off Washington Square. The not-for-profit's goal is "to provide free theatre space to emerging and independent artists. We believe that space must be made available to artists to try out new work, to learn and inspire one another."
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