Mark Russell, formerly the executive artistic director of P.S. 122, produces the festival, which takes place mainly at the Public but also in other theatres around New York.
The works include MacIvor's play A Beautiful View, about "two women who forge a romance that keeps falling apart," according to a release. Solo writer-performer Daisey's Invincible Summer is about the New York subway and Daisey's Brooklyn neighborhood in "the last glorious summer before everything changed."
Radio Macbeth, co-directed by Anne Bogart and Darron L. West and created and performed by SITI Company, is about actors rehearsing the Shakespeare play while ghosts of previous productions hover around them. The show is a work in progress and will make its premiere at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University on Feb 15.
Among the other works is Get Your War On, by the company Rude Mechanicals, a critique of the Bush administration using overhead projectors, clip art and David Rees' internet comic strip "Get Your War On." The work, which began Jan. 9, is one of two shows with runs that extend outside the festival dates. The other is Must Don't Whip 'Um, by the singer and performance artist Cynthia Hopkins in collaboration with Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg.
The Brothers Size, by Tarell McCraney and directed by Tea Alagic, a production of the Foundry Theatre, is inspired by West African myths but tells the contemporary story of the odd-couple Size brothers from San Pere, LA. Dead Set #3, by Caden Manson and Big Art Group, produced by Big Art Group and Diane White, "explores the embodiment of trauma through a synthesis of reenacted pirated dialogue, borrowed online chats, and choreographic action derived from sampled movement."
No Dice by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma "takes over one hundred hours of the company's recorded telephone conversations and filters them through the conventions of amateur dinner theatre to arrive at a uniquely mind-altering experience."
Nine Years is a U.S. premiere of a work by the British duo Lone Twin that "boils down their entire body of work into one 90-minute show." En Un Sol Amarillo (Memorias de un Temblor) by Teatro de los Andes and directed by César Brie, is about a 1998 earthquake in Bolivia. Two Songs, written and performed by John O’Keefe, features O'Keefe's Sunshine's a Glorious Bird and the world premiere of his adaptation of Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself.'"
Other works include Another You, written and performed by Allen Johnson and directed by Sean Ryan; Famous Puppet Death Scenes by The Old Trout Puppet Workshop from Canada; Epistle to Young Actors, written and directed by the French playwright Olivier Py; and The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, written and performed by Taylor Mac and directed by David Drake, a one-night combination of "cabaret, political tirade and gender illusion."
Most of the productions are at the Public Theater at 425 Lafayette Street. For more information call (212) 967-7555 or visit www.publictheater.org/UTR.
