CENTERSTAGE Launches Play Lab With WAY TO CURACAO, Now thru 12/2

CENTERSTAGE presents the first Play Lab of the 2012-13 Season, Way to Curaçao by Chiori Miyagawa, tonight, November 30 through December 2. Gavin Witt directs.

Public readings are Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 2 pm. Don’t forget to get here early to enjoy the signature Toast Bar—a fun array of breads and spreads to nosh on before the reading. Open rehearsal times on Saturday will give audiences the chance to sit in earlier in the day and get a taste of how a new play is workshopped and directed for a reading. (Specific times will be announced shortly, at www.centerstage.org/playlabs).

Way to Curaçao (a partially whimsical play about memories of tragedies) begins in August 1940 in Lithuania, where Japanese Ambassador Sugihara has exactly 29 days to hand-write thousands of transit visas for Jewish refugees to go through Japan to reach the Caribbean island of Curacao, where no entry visa is needed. More than 70 years later, in New York City, a mother and a daughter who have never met Sugihara try to preserve, dismantle, and ultimately rebuild memory of him.

Tickets are $10 and can be purchased online at www.centerstage.org, or by calling the Box Office at 410-332-0033. Open rehearsals are free, but reservations should be made by emailing the Box Office at rsvp@centerstage.org.

Developing a new play doesn’t happen overnight. The process of workshops, readings, and rewrites plays a vital role in helping playwrights see and hear their work—as holes get filled in, characters get solidified, dialogue comes to life, and the play gets on its feet. First audiences are at the heart of that effort. CENTERSTAGE’s Play Lab Series is dedicated to this cause. Every year the theater hosts a series of diverse readings, complete with open rehearsals, that invites the audience to join the process.

Chiori Miyagawa is a Resident Playwright at New Dramatists, and Playwright-in-Residence at Bard College. She has been featured in such publications as the New York Times and American Theatre Magazine, and has had plays produced by such Off Broadway theaters as Vineyard Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Women’s Project, and Culture Project. Her signature explorations of multidisciplinary work, combining ordinary dialogue and poetic language, and the manipulation of time can be found in her recent play, I Have Been To Hiroshima Mon Amour. Other recent work includes Thousand Years and Waiting and Other Plays, a collection of seven previously unpublished plays, and the upcoming America Dreaming and Other Plays. Her play, Jamaica Avenue, was directed by Sonoko Kawahara for the New York International Fringe Festival, and Red Again/Antigone Project, which was produced by Women’s Project, was selected as one of the 2004-05 season’s best by the New York Times.

CENTERSTAGE, the State Theater of Maryland, celebrates its 50th Anniversary Season in 2012-13. The professional, nonprofit company serves as a local hub and national leader for provocative, entertaining theater and as a catalyst for conversation in the community. Each year, a broad range of productions in two intimate performance spaces attracts a highly diverse audience of more than 100,000 people—including more than 8,000 fiercely loyal members. Under the leadership of acclaimed playwright, actor, and director Kwame Kwei-Armah (Artistic Director) and national arts leader Stephen Richard (Managing Director), CENTERSTAGE enters its 50th year with a renewed dedication to the production of world-class theater in the heart of Baltimore.

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