TRY ! TRY ! by Frank O'Hara and CLUTTER by Kristin Prevallet

HOWL ! ARTS PROJECT 2009:
THEATER
45 Bleecker Street Theater
(NE Corner of Lafayette at Mulberry St)
(By subway: #6 train to Bleecker Street Station)

Monday Sept 28, 8:00pm* Talk back with Lytle Shaw
Tuesday Sept 29, 8:00pm* Talk back with Anne Waldman

TRY ! TRY ! and CLUTTER:
Poets Theater – A Double Bill
Featuring: Alex Bilu, Dan Illian, Elizabeth Ruelas
Verse Theater Manhattan
Directed and produced by Richard Ryan
Sound by Christopher North
Production design by Craig Napoliello
Associate producer Max Woertendyke

TRY ! TRY ! by Frank O’Hara
Frank O’ Hara’s lyrical vignette of love, lust and social disruption.
A man. A woman. An interloper. Frank O'Hara's lyrical vignette of love, lust, and social disruption.

CLUTTER by Kristin Prevallet
A boy. A girl. A radio. Trying to make sense out of chaos.
Kristin Prevallet's contemporary snapshot of spacial claustrophobia and mental rewiring.

Clutter by poet Kristin Prevallet is a black comedy about the Internet's malevolent influence on the minds of Ben and Lacy -- two writers with opposing creative minds. Imagining a time in the not too distant future when we can log in and communicate directly with Google muses who will provide insight into our every thought, Clutter entertains the question: can the Internet to remap our neural circuitry and reprogram our reality? As Nicholas Carr writes in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid, "When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net's image." For Ben and Lacy, resisting getting absorbed is as difficult as trying to maintain order in the apartment when Google -- or someone else -- keeps rearranging the furniture.

*Monday Sept. 28th: talk-back with O’Hara scholar and poet Lytle Shaw.
*Tuesday Sept. 29th: talk back with poet Anne Waldman

Admission $10 to Benefit the HOWL ! HELP Fund
Advance tickets at: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/79140
Cash only tickets available at the door at 6:00pm until showtime.
www.versetheater.org

The poet Frank O’Hara (awarded the National Book Award for Poetry posthumously in 1972) was a key figure in the postwar New York School of poets and painters which includes poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler, and painters Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns. Enormously influential on subsequent generations of American poets, O’Hara’s poetry was at once colloquial and dreamy, embracing high modernism, camp, pop, and surrealism in their uncanny range of styles and influences. His remarkable works for the stage were often originally produced in collaboration with the legendary Living Theater, a seminal force in the downtown arts scene of the 50s and 60s, and are important early examples of performance art as a genre.

Kristin Prevallet’s most recent book is a lyric essay called I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time (Essay Press, 2007). Her previous collections are Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-text Projects (Skanky Possum, 2006), Perturbation, My Sister (1998) and Shadow Evidence Intelligence (Factory School, 2006). She edited and introduced A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation, 2007). Her collaboration with the musician Esfand Poumand is featured on Bowery Poetry Club Records Live! She received a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry and she currently lives in Brooklyn. Clutter is her work for the stage. (Playwright: Clutter)

Verse Theater Manhattan (VTM) is the preeminent theater company in the English speaking world devoted exclusively to verse drama. VTM is devoted to discovering and staging the best of old and new verse drama and bringing it to the widest possible audience. VTM's mission is both practical and high-minded: as producers we coordinate and support the theatrical effort of poets, directors, and performers working to bring verse drama to the stage; as supporters of the New York cultural environment, we unite the city's diverse theatrical and literary community.
VTM is open to all styles, genres, and periods of verse drama. VTM seeks out contemporary and ancient texts, classics and translations. VTM is especially interested in encouraging and promoting the work of living poets working to bring verse to the stage.
www.versetheater.org

Photo credit: Elizabeth Ruelas as Violet in a scene from TRY ! TRY ! by Frank O’ Hara.
Photo by Nathaniel Siegel. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Copyright Nathaniel Siegel.

Photo credit: Elizabeth Ruelas and Dan Illian in a scene from TRY ! TRY ! by Frank O’ Hara. Photo by Nathaniel Siegel. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Copyright Nathaniel Siegel.

Photo credit: Clutter by Kristin Prevallet poster design.
Used with permission. All rights reserved.
Copyright Kristin Prevallet.