Mark your calendar! Join Coyote REP, Andrea Caban, Rachel Eckerling & the rest of the creative team of Questions My Mother Can't Answer for a cocktail party and fund-raising event to kick off the upcoming Fringe Festival!
Your $10 admission fee lets you enjoy lots of great food donated by some of New York's landmarks (Patsy's, Levain Bakery, Mcgee's and Crumbs to name a few), receive one raffle ticket for the Questions My Mother... Can't Answer- Donate Your Birth Control Money Raffle (items include a Slingbox, an iTouch, gift certificates to Josie's Restaurant & Giggle Baby Products, personal training at Equinox, private in-home Pilates instruction & of course tickets to the show, to name just a few), sip on McGee's generous drink specials, and buy some more raffle tickets!
RSVP to the event (click here) so we know to expect you. And tell your friends! The more the merrier!!
If you can't make the event but would still like to contribute to the cause, go to www.questionsmymothercantanswer.com and click on 'Donate This Month's Birth Control Money'on the right nav. No contribution is too big or small. Really.
Questions My Mother Can’t Answer, a moving and funny one woman show written by and starring Andrea Caban, recipient of the 2008 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, will be part of the 14th annual New York International Fringe Festival – presented at New York Theatre Workshop's 4th Street Theater.
SCHEDULE!
SUN 8/15 @ 10:15pm
SUN 8/22 @ 1:45pm
TUE 8/24 @ 2:00pm
THUR 8/26 @ 6:45pm
FRI 8/27 @ 9:15pm
Andrea’s on a mission: she interviews eight “women-of-a-certain-age” including a sexy Moroccan ballroom dancer, a donations-only prostitute, and her Aunt Shirley, about getting pregnant, staying married and finding a flow. As she embarks on a healing journey after a personal tragic event, Andrea looks for guidance from a variety of female role models, only to find that there are no role models…that we are all flawed and that life isn't about avoiding accidents, or tragedy, but how we deal with it.
Produced by Coyote REP Theatre Company www.coyoterep.org, directed by Rachel Eckerling, co-director of this season’s acclaimed The Diary of a Teenage Girl at 3LD Arts & Technology Center and frequent collaborator of Francis Ford Coppola on both theatre and film projects. The creative team for Questions My Mother Can’t Answer will also include Grammy Award-winning sound designer Marcelo Añez and lighting designer Jason Teague.
Hey Friends! Here's a note from Andrea Caban about her upcoming FringeNYC show Questions my Mother Can't Answer! Check it out!
~~~
52 days until FringeNYC kicks off and I’m yet again jumping into the role of the lone wolf in the spotlight facing a pack protected by the dark. That notion used to scare me a lot more than it does in this moment. I think the story I’m telling in this piece and the journey of creating this piece for myself has helped me face a lot of fears about life & art. So laughing at myself and bearing my soul in front of a crowd of strangers, family and friends seems more like fun than anything else.
I’m in California now, reading the play for old friends and getting ready to learn it. Yes, I do have to make time to memorize the words I wrote. You’d think it would be a given, but no.
Through May and June, Rachel Eckerling, my lovely director helped me develop the arch of my story as it threads together the stories of the eight women I interviewed. And as soon as I get back to New York, I start rehearsals with Rachel, and the rest of my amazing team, including my Grammy award winning sound designer and my company manager who just happens to be my loving husband. So I’m a lucky woman, I know that.
But for now, I’m here in California re-connecting with old collaborators, classmates from grad school & dear friends, most of whom are women. In QMMCA, I’m searching for answers about how to be a good wife, when to be mother, and how to heal myself after a tragic event.As I snuggle into my old friendships here in Cali and indulge in some of this most-needed quality time that I’m ashamed I didn’t make a priority before now, I’m realizing in a very visceral way that all my friends are struggling with the same things I’m exploring in this piece.I knew that instinctively before coming out here, but now I really know.And I know the specifics. And I think we early thirty-somethings are taking a look at our lives and what we had expected our lives to be by this point, and it’s not always easy to take in the whole truth. Some of us are achieving everything we set out to and still haven’t found happiness, some of us are still looking for that one person to share life with, and some of us are in life or death situations because what we are is not at all what we expected to be.
I’m more inspired than ever to tell my story and be as honest and simple as I can be in hopes that it will push my girlfriends to face their stories and move beyond them. And their girlfriends and their boyfriends, and their mothers and their fathers. I have high hopes.
So I guess I’m really not very alone after all is this ‘solo’ piece. I can’t wait to share it with you.
It's the week for special announcements at Coyote REP!
And here's a great one.
Mike Caban has been named CR's new Literary Manager! He's smart. He's experienced. He ours! Meet the man who will help shape seasons to come at CR.
Welcome aboard, Mike. We are lucky to have you.
Get to know Mike Caban:
Mike Caban is excited about joining Coyote REP as Literary Manager. He first became involved with Coyote REP through his wife Andrea, also a company member, in late 2007 as a volunteer working on their annual Rising Moon Fundraiser. Since then, he has worked with CR as an actor in their successful radio play Deception, and is now honored to take on a more substantial role in the Company.
Mike brings considerable experience in working behind the scenes of a theatre company, as he was co-founder and co-Artistic Director of Jobsite Theater, an acclaimed theater based in Tampa, FL. From their humble beginnings playing at a minuscule art gallery that once was a row home in a bad neighborhood, to their present home in a state-of-the-art black box space at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Mike was there for the first two years and came to appreciate the work involved in rallying a group of like-minded artists -- all of whom were close friends from university --into working as a company and cultivating an audience. As an actor, he knew he wanted to do shows that spoke to him, that were politically and socially relevant. As a co-founder, he was influential in working with the other members by encouraging them to pick interesting, under-celebrated works by established playwrights, and presenting them with a fresh, innovative perspective.
But by far his favorite part of that group’s repertoire was the Original Works program, which invited new voices -- starting with the founding members of the company -- to create plays and present them in their October-November slot. Now as a writer, director and company board member, Mike learned first-hand the challenges involved in fostering brand new work and sharing it with their nascent, hungry audience.
To Mike, the most alluring aspect of Coyote REP is their ambition and courage to look from within, to encourage the company to create what they present, and to do so with tremendous success. It is his hope that as Literary Manager at Coyote REP, he can continue in that track with this impressive group of artists and help to discover new playwrights -- be it the person across the table from him or even in the mirror -- and to cultivate an audience that will be back again and again, knowing that they will always have a home for fresh work at Coyote REP.
Coyote REP is proud to announce that Andrea Caban's beautiful new solo endeavor Questions my Mother Can't Answer has been named an official selection for the 2010 New York International Fringe Festival! You might remember that Questions was recently presented as part of our Works-in-Development Series and was a huge hit with our audience.
Questions My Mother Can’t Answer, a moving and funny one woman show written by and starring Andrea Caban, recipient of the 2008 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, will be part of the 14th annual New York International Fringe Festival starting August 13 through August 29 – presented at New York Theatre Workshop's 4th Street Theater.
Andrea’s on a mission: she interviews eight “women-of-a-certain-age” including a sexy Moroccan ballroom dancer, a donations-only prostitute, and her Aunt Shirley, about getting pregnant, staying married and finding a flow. As she embarks on a healing journey after a personal tragic event, Andrea looks for guidance from a variety of female role models, only to find that there are no role models…that we are all flawed and that life isn't about avoiding accidents, or tragedy, but how we deal with it.
Produced by Coyote REP Theatre Company www.coyoterep.org, directed by Rachel Eckerling, co-director of this season’s acclaimed The Diary of a Teenage Girl at 3LD Arts & Technology Center and frequent collaborator of Francis Ford Coppola on both theatre and film projects. The creative team for Questions My Mother Can’t Answer will also include Grammy Award-winning sound designer Marcelo Añez and lighting designer Jason Teague.
They're doing it again and, yes, we may be a long shot but I encourage you to vote for Coyote REP in the Chase Community Giving event happening right now on Facebook.
It only takes a second and it will help us keep our programs running. The smallest prize of 20k will help the Works-In-Development Series continue for oh, ten years!!
The New Normal
By Donnetta Lavinia Grays
Directed by Isaac Byrne
Monday May 24th 7pm
ART/NY Bruce Mitchell Room
520 8th Avenue, 3rd Floor
(between 36th and 37th Streets)
New York, NY 10018
($5 suggested donation)
So, back in 2007 I am on the receiving end of a mass email from my mentor Joy Vandervort-Cobb at The College of Charleston in South Carolina. She writes that a former student and friend, Anna Dorcas Warren (Schumacher), is participating in the Susan G. Komen 3 Day Walk for the Cure and that we should support her by sending in what we can. I see the words diagnosed in 2006, battle, fight, baby…and I don’t quite get what I am reading. I mean, Anna is around my age. So, even with those specific words on my computer screen I think to myself, “I wonder who Anna’s walking for?” Seriously, I could not make the connection from “diagnosed with breast cancer” to Anna herself.I think, instead “Dude, Anna got married?? Anna’s got a baby?? Hot dog! I really need to get in touch with that chick!" Then my mind wonders to a couple plays we did together while we were in school and…yeah, I think that was that.
For one thing, this says quite a bit about my attention to detail, but moreover, in my mind Breast Cancer had always been this sort of disease of age. I mean, I knew my neurosis would have me spending the better part of my 40th birthday cooped up in some doctor’s office demanding another look-see at my mammogram results. There were commercials, morning talk shows and Oprah at 4pm all telling me that there was a threshold. I knew my facts. But, I also knew that Anna was maybe a couple seconds older than me (she was 32) so, there was no room whatsoever for her to fit into that medical community and media driven equation. No room. So, I couldn’t really see the words in that email as the truth. I guess I was shocked and shockingly ignorant.
And then there was Facebook.
I had lost touch with Anna for a while. And then, through the magic of Facebook in early 2008 we found each other again. We chatted. We exchanged inappropriate jokes as is our nature. We laughed “LOL” style. And then I clicked on a link attached to her profile page which led me to her personal blog.
Man…there were pictures. I saw my friend’s beautiful bald head. I saw my friend’s beautiful baby boy, Silas. Her husband, Kevin. I saw her being a Southern girl dealing with Seattle. Yeah. But, I also saw her…drinkin’, partyin’ and cussin’ with other beautiful bald ladies, putting ketchup on anything that moved, cracking jokes and being the firecracker I remembered from school. I saw Anna living. I saw Anna’s babyface making this incredible turn into adulthood and around that corner comes this disease to meet her full on. And I broke. I did. I broke out into tears. I broke into laughter reading about her son’s potty training stories and I broke open with so much love for her and a clearer understanding of why her diagnosis didn’t really sink in for me. The public dialogue about women under 40 being diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer had not reached me and so, it wasn't a part of a reality that I could digest in reference to her.
That dialogue hasn’t reached a lot of people. And that’s what both Anna and I want to change with this play.
The New Normal is based on Anna’s blog which she maintains to this day. It details not only her struggle with breast cancer, but also the joys and pains of being a mother, wife, daughter and a member of a community of young women facing there lives as survivors.
The characters’ development in the play (of Anna and of those in her family and community)have been dramatized and fictionalized, of course, in order to ground the argument that young survivors are invisible to a certain extent and that this specific illness affects relationships and families not only the women who are diagnosed. Their portrayals are amplified to reveal truths.
The New Normal received an initial workshop with Coyote REP in June 2009. Invited guest artists during that workshop were a collection of individuals who either knew Anna while she was a theater student at The College of Charleston, Coyote REP members or artists who where familiar with creating documentary theater: Emily Ackerman (The Civilians), Blaire Brooks, Safiya Fredericks, Chad Goodridge, Carla Musgrove, Laura Rikard and Jeanne LaSala. These artists were invaluable in helping to sculpt a time frame and context for over 300 pages of blog entries.
Ultimately, I want to illuminate a major point that I learned
from reading Anna’s blog and knowing her as a human
being. The humor in her blog is directed at the illness the majority of the time. This is not by coincidence. I think she says through her humor, “look, it’s the people in my life who are sacred NOT this disease. I have it, but I get to define it. Not the other way around.”I hope that this sentiment is reflected in the work Coyote REP has started to create.
Donnetta Lavinia Grays is the Artistic Director and is a Founding Member of Coyote REP Theatre Company. She worked with Director Bill Rauch as an AltvaterFellowship Recipient at Cornerstone Theatre Company and served as Stage Manager and assistant to Fredrick Bailey on the original production of Beth Henley’s Sister’s of the Winter Madrigal at Moving Arts Theatre in Los Angeles. Donnetta also served as an assistant to Woodie King Jr. on various projects for New Federal Theater including BLACKBEAUTIES: Celebrating 100 Years of African-AmericanWomen on Broadway. Donnetta has written the cowboy is dying, her first solo play effort, which she performed with Coyote REP in 2008. Her play THE B FACTOR received a reading at Henry Street Settlement’s AbronsArtsCenter as a part of the 2002 Women of Color Arts and Film Festival and a reading with TOSOS Theater Company in 2009 as part of their Robert Chesley / Jane Chambers Playwrights Project. She has also presented her written work at Pride Goes East and with Kathleen Warnock’s Drunken Careening Writers series at KGB Bar. Other works-in-progress include ABSENCE OF FAITH, and THE REVIEW (working title). Poetry featured on shortpoem.org.
Acting Credits; with Coyote REP, the cowboy is dying, DECPETION, PATRIOT ACT (AN OCCURRENCE AT YANKEE STADIUM Broadway: IN THE NEXT ROOM OR THE VIBRATOR PLAY (Cover), WELL (Cover). Off- Broadway: SHIPWRECKED! AN ENTERTAINMENT (Primary Stages) Regional Theatre: NO CHILD…(2 Connecticut Critics Circle Awards) JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE (Baltimore’s Center Stage) WELL (Huntington Theatre, Arena Stage), A RAISIN IN THE SUN, THE ROYAL FAMILY (Oregon Shakespeare Festival). TWELFTH NIGHT (Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Co.), MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (Charleston Shakespeare Co.),Television: RUBICON, MERCY and LAW & ORDER: SVU (all recurring), THE SOPRANOS , LAW & ORDER and LAW & ORDER: CI. Film: THE WRESTLER (Darren Aronosfsky dir.) SHOOK and the Emmy Award winning documentary WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Proud member of AEA, SAG and AFTRA. Also a member of TOSOS Theater Company. BA: College of Charleston. MFA: University of California, Irvine. www.donnettagrays.com
The New Play Development Program is our commitment to nurturing the original work of our company's playwrights. This intensive, ten-month program provides a structured series of workshops culminating in our May Works-in-Development Series, a public presentation of readings.
Mark your calendar! Join Coyote REP, Andrea Caban, Rachel Eckerling & the rest of the creative team of Questions My Mother Can't Answer for a cocktail party and fund-raising event to kick off the upcoming Fringe Festival!
