Acclaimed Theater School Stages Six Weeks of Plays Downtown with Free Admission
Now through mid May, the renowned Actors Studio Drama School (an affiliate of Lower Manhattan’s Pace University) is mounting its annual Repertory Season, a repertoire of nine cutting-edge plays, in the performance space at 80 Greenwich Street (between Rector and Edgar Streets). Tickets to all Repertory Season productions are offered free of charge, but must be reserved in advance. Each staging in the six-week festival takes place on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. (Shows start at 7:30pm each night, with a Saturday 3pm matinee also available.)
Plays staged this weekend include “Last Rites,” by S.E. Wiseman, about a death-row inmate’s encounter with a novice prison chaplain, and how two lost souls grapple with issues of revenge and redemption. Also this weekend is “Red Sky Summer,” by Niall Estevan Martinez Ridgley—a modern Wild West-reinterpretation of the traditional coming-of-age story.
Next week, offerings include, Daniel McIvor’s “This Is A Play” (a uproarious postmodern romp through the inner lives of actors stuck in a bad play) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Dinner with Friends,” by Donald Margulies (a meditation on the fragility of marriage, which follows two couples over a 12-year period).
For the week of April 26 through 29, “Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom” (by Jennifer Haley) is a dark meta-comedy set in a suburban subdivision with identical houses, where parents find their teenagers addicted to an online horror video game, itself set in a subdivision with identical houses. The goal of the game is to defeat an army of zombies and escape from the neighborhood.
Also the week of April 26, “Helsinki Cycle” (by Niall Estevan Martinez Ridgley) tells the story of a tormented painter who travels to Finland, losing his girlfriend and his memory along the way. Desperate understand why, he turns to a secretive modern witch to heal him and bring his lost love back.
From May 3 to 6, “The Mountaintop” (by Katori Hall) offers a fictional narrative of the last night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, set entirely in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel on the eve of his 1968 assassination.
And in the Repertory Season’s final week (May 10 to 13), Pulitzer Prize-finalist “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” by Will Arbery, focuses on four alumni of a conservative Catholic college who reunite to confront themselves and each other, clashing over theology, politics and personal responsibility.