Under the Influence Reviewed on Broadway After Dark!

http://www.broadwayafterdark.com/Williams-Rude.php#UndertheInfluence

Sold Out Saturday 5/15

Talking Back: Join us for a conversation after the show

We are proud to announce an incredible roster of artists, academics and legal practitioners who will participate in a conversation with the audience, cast and production team about art, authority, inspiration and appropriation after each performance.

Participants' bios follow.

May 13:

Mark Sam Rosenthal

Sonia Katyal

May 14:

Alfred Steiner

May 15:

Virginia Rutledge

***************

MARK SAM ROSENTHAL is a Baton Rouge native living in New York. His solo show, Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire, had a nine-week off-Broadway run at New York’s SoHo Playhouse in winter 2009 and a summer 2009 run at the Art House Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Blanche premiered to sell-out crowds at the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival, where it won the Village Voice Audience Award. Mark Sam has studied and performed improv comedy with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and his comedy sketches have been performed there and in San Francisco by the sketch group Killing My Lobster. He performs at storytelling shows like Kevin Allison’s RISK!, The Nights of Our Lives, Stripped Stories, and Reading for Filth. Other writing and performing credits include his solo show Love Mercy (People’s Improv Theater), Menage a Trailer (co-writer, Chicago’s Factory Theater), Beyond the Valley of the Switchblade Pussycats (UCBT), The Indigo Girls vs. George W. Bush (The Cutting Room), and Jollyship the Whiz-Bang’s Little Building (Galapagos). Mark Sam works currently as a writer/producer for Comedy Central.

Blanche Survives Katrina is a scathing look at the government's response to Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of Blanche Dubois, the leading lady in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. The production team behind Blanche Survives Katrina received a cease and desist letter from the University of the South, which owns the rights to the Williams' play, threatening litigation if the production was not stopped. After retaining pro bono counsel, the production team decided to finish the run.


PROFESSOR SONIA KATYAL teaches in the areas of intellectual property, property, and civil rights at Fordham Law School. Sonia's scholarly work focuses on intellectual property, civil rights (including gender and sexuality), art, civil disobedience, and new media. Her articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Texas Law Review, in addition, shorter pieces have appeared in The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Katyal's recently published Property Outlaws (co-authored with Eduardo M. Penalver), Yale University Press.
In 2008, Katyal was awarded a grant from the Warhol Foundation for her second book, Contrabrand.

Katyal is a graduate of Brown University, and received her JD from the University of Chicago Law School. After law school, Professor Katyal clerked for the Honorable Carlos Moreno (now a California Supreme Court Justice) in the Central District of California and the Honorable Dorothy Nelson in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.


ALFRED STEINER is an artist and lawyer living in New York. His work has been been reviewed in The New Yorker and The Harvard Crimson, and has appeared in group shows at such venues as The Brucennial 2010, BravinLee Programs, Exit Art, Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects, The New School, No Longer Empty, Silver Shed, and Swarm Gallery. In 1995, Mr. Steiner received a B.S. in mathematics and a B.A. in philosophy from Miami University. Alfred received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1998 and has been practicing law for the past ten years at Morrison & Foerster LLP, where he advises clients on intellectual property and technology-related matters.


VIRGINIA RUTLEDGE is a New York-based attorney with experience across many sectors of the media and content industries, in both commercial and nonprofit contexts. She began her legal career as a litigator at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, representing major clients including Time Warner Inc. and the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. From Cravath she joined the nonprofit Creative Commons as Vice President and General Counsel, serving as lead legal advisor and working on strategic development. Currently, she is in private practice, advising artists, authors, cultural organizations, collectors, and dealers on intellectual property, transactions, and new enterprises. Virginia is also an art historian and was formerly an exhibition associate at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She speaks frequently on art and law, and has written for Art in America, Bookforum and Artforum. She is a member of the New York State Bar, and chairs the Art Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association.

--------- Under The Influence - Two Plays: --------- The Mad Brooklynite and Sunlight in a Cafeteria

The Tank
354 West 45th Street
between 8th and 9th Aves.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday
May 13, 14, 15 2010 9:30 pm
Click to Buy Tickets: $15

Two one-act plays, each adapted from other works, one literary the other visual. THE MAD BROOKLYNITE, based on short stories by novelist Jonathan Lethem, poses the question, what happens when you ask directions of a stranger on a Brooklyn subway platform? SUNLIGHT IN A CAFETERIA imagines the two subjects of an Edward Hopper painting come to life, fully aware that they are in a work of art.

Followed by a conversation about art, authority, inspiration and appropriation.

The Mad Brooklynite
by Ben Bowman
based upon the short stories “The Mad Brooklynite” and “Breakfast at Brelreck’s”
by Jonathan Lethem
directed by Ben Bowman
with Ato Essandoh, Clare Barron and Almeria Campbell

Sunlight in a Cafeteria
by Anna Ziegler
directed by Dina Leytes
with Jessica Dickey and Andrew Garman



Produced by Dina Leytes and Gbenga Akinnagbe




About the Plays:

 The Mad Brooklynite is a dramatic re-working of two short stories by Brooklyn writer Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner; Fortress of Solitude, 2003 NY Times Best Seller) by filmmaker Ben Bowman, staging his first play. Set in a Brooklyn subway station, a young traveler seeks directions from an eccentric borough denizen.



Sunlight in a Cafeteria is a beautiful and haunting recasting of an Edward Hopper painting. It depicts the two lone figures of the painting as having come to life. The author of Sunlight in a Cafeteria is Anna Ziegler, a Brooklyn playwright. Anna recently won the Third Annual STAGE Competition for her play Photograph 51, which was judged by David Auburn, John Guare, David Lindsay-Abaire and two Nobel Laureates.



About the Production Team:



Dina Leytes (Producer/Director Sunlight in a Cafeteria):


In 2009, Dina produced Two Girls, a solo show about two girls, one black, one white, coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. Two Girls played to sold-out audiences as part of the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, D.C., and the Midtown International Theatre Festival in New York. Dina has directed Beckett’s Play and Chekhov’s The Bear at Stanford University and assisted on professional productions of Antigone and Stolen Child in Dublin, Ireland. Dina is an attorney with the firm Lewis & Hand, LLP, where she concentrates her practice on intellectual property law.

Gbenga Akinnagbe (Producer):



Gbenga Akinnagbe is best recognized from his role as enforcer Chris Partlow on HBO's acclaimed series, THE WIRE. Since then, Gbenga (the first “G” is silent) has worked at the The Public Theatre, Shakespeare in the Park, and appears in the world premier of the one person show The Thin Place at Seattle's Intiman Theater in the Spring of 2010. Gbenga made his film debut in the Oscar nominated, THE SAVAGES, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney. His latest projects include Tony Scott's THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 with Denzel Washington and John Travolta, EDGE OF DARKNESS alongside Mel Gibson for director Martin Campbell and THE GOOD WIFE on CBS. Gbenga is a producer of the film Knucklehead.


Ben Bowman (Writer/Director The Mad Brooklynite):

Ben grew up acting in the regional theaters of Minneapolis, Minnesota before becoming a filmmaker. His award-winning short films, including "New Detroit" (2001), have screened at festivals around the world. Ben’s Brooklyn set feature screenplay Knucklehead was written with Bryan Abrams. Their twist on the gritty urban drama won a cash prize as a finalist for the 2006 Richard Vague Award. Ben's 2003 screenplay One Thousand Feet Deep, an off-beat seafaring thriller, won the Minnesota Independent Film Fund, the nation's only development grant for independent features. Ben holds an MFA from the NYU/Tisch graduate film program, where he has also taught. “The Mad Brooklynite” is his first play.

The Housewife, 2009 Alfred Steiner

Image Design by Juliana Kreinik