Call for Scripts: The WINKS Staged Reading Series Continues (Season Three)

Wide Eyed Productions will be hosting our third installment of the WINKS staged reading series! This time around, we will be focusing exclusively on new theatrical works of adapted content (meaning plays inspired by other works).

The Double Take Reading Series: A Wide Eyed Look at Theatrical Adaptation

Wide Eyed Productions is excited to continue its work on new American plays like our recent, world premiere production of Dead Special Crabs by Dan Kitrosser and the award-winning Animals by Sam Byron. We had such a good response to the previous seasons of readings, we want the fun to continue.

From March through August 2015, please join us on the first Tuesday of every month at The Drama League, where we will feature a 20-minute segment from three original works by three different writers, which are related to, or inspired by, that month’s theme (see below). At the end of each night, the audience will be invited to select their favorite of the evening anonymously. The majority favorite will be named a semifinalist and be invited to submit a full text* to Wide Eyed Productions’ Artistic Board for consideration for our final round.

Two (or three?) overall finalists will be chosen, and given a full staged reading of their play at the end of the WINKS series, and one winning text will be chosen based on audience and board votes. This winning text will then be workshopped with intent to produce in an upcoming season.

What you need to know:

• Playwrights should currently reside within the five boroughs of New York City.
• The play does not need to be a world premiere.
• The play does not need to be a fully completed text when it is initially submitted.
• Musicals will be considered as long as they are submitted with a music sample.
• Directors and casts will be provided by Wide Eyed Productions, but we love it when you have suggestions for people you love to work with!
• *The full text of the final play is not to exceed a 90-minute estimated run time. Semifinalists will be given a deadline for submissions of full texts.
• All submissions must be received by January 15, 2015.
• Please submit selections of text, treatments, and other support material to submissions.wideeyed@gmail.com subject line, the appropriate theme for your play.

The 2015 monthly themes are as follows:  

• MARCH: Anything But Disney: Adaptations from fairy tales from around the world.
• APRIL: Shake it Up: Adaptations from any of the Bard's many works.
• MAY: In the News: Adaptations from past or current news stories from all forms of media.
• JUNE: It’s All Greek to Me: Adaptations from Greek texts and mythos.
• JULY: myTunes: Adaptations from pop songs, opera and other musical inspirations.
• AUGUST: Page Turners: Adaptations from works of literature.

Wide Eyed Productions exists to bring brave, bold and culturally relevant new texts to production. With a core ensemble of emerging theatre artists, we are dedicated to leaving our audience Wide Eyed.

Save the Date: Wide Eyed Productions' Second Annual Gala ~ March 7, 2015

Wide Eyed Productions

presents our 

Second Annual Gala

~Save the Date ~ 

 

Saturday, March 7, 2015

7:00 pm 

Dune Studios, 121 Varick Street, NYC

Please join us for a Masquerade Ball on March 7, 2015 in celebration of eight years of producing brave, bold, and culturally relative new texts. All proceeds to benefit our 2015 theatrical season. 

You won't want to miss it! 

Save $20 by purchasing your early bird tickets before December 31, 2014.  

Giving Thanks. #GivingTuesday.

The holiday season has officially kicked off, and we are so very grateful for our families, friends, audience, and donors. This Tuesday, December 2, marks #GivingTuesday. Wide Eyed Productions is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and we'd love to help you with that end-of-year tax deduction. Your generosity goes towards keeping our audiences wide-eyed for years to come. 

We'll see you under the mistletoe.

On the High Road - and the High Seas - with DEAD SPECIAL CRABS

Look who's the Photo of the Week in Time Out New York! Many thanks to Al Foote III Theatrical Photography.

The reviews are starting to trickle in, and it's all goodness - this one from TalkinBroadway.com is a great primer ("funny stuff, indeed"). We'll be posting more of those as they come in to our Facebook page, so be sure to follow us over there.

Opening night is this Friday, November 14! Small reception to follow. Get those tickets.

The Genesis of Walter

Andrew Harriss grew a beard for DEAD SPECIAL CRABS and made a video about it.
We kind of love him for it. Previews continue tonight. Get your tickets here!

Meet the DEAD SPECIAL CRABS Cast: Amy Lee Pearsall

 

Amy Lee Pearsall is a long-time member of Wide Eyed Productions, having appeared with the company in The Trojan Women, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and their inaugural production of The Medea, among others. She was named as one of Indie Theater Now’s People of the Year for 2013. NYC stage credits include: Picture Ourselves in Latvia (New Light Theater Project); King Kirby (Comic Book Theater Festival/The Brick); Lickspittles, Buttonholers, and Damned Pernicious Go-Betweens (Boomerang Theatre Company); Blast Radius (The Honeycomb Trilogy) (Gideon Productions). A member of AEA, SAG-AFTRA, and the League of Professional Theatre Women, Amy Lee has served as a member of the nytheater now (née nytheatre.com) reviewing squad since 2010. www.amyleepearsall.com

• You’ll be performing in our upcoming world premiere production of Dead Special Crabs. What was your history with the piece before coming on board for the full production (if any)? 

Wide Eyed Productions produced a staged reading of Dead Special Crabs during our WINKS staged reading series, season one. It was a real crowd pleaser. In that incarnation, I read the part of Aunt Missy, and had a great time with it. And the company just fell in love with Dan's play; it is so ridiculously funny. This time around, I’m playing Kathy - a different experience, but equally delightful.

• How are rehearsals going? Can you tell us a little bit about the character you’ll be playing in Dead Special Crabs, and your favorite thing about this role? (No spoilers!)

Rehearsals have been a hoot. (Yeah, I said it.) It’s a fantastic cast and creative team - just a great group of people - and I’m delighted to be a part of it. I mean, really, just look at this photo. Those are not the faces of abject misery. We are clearly having a good time.

photo by Al Foote III

As for what I can tell you about Kathy…she’s a religious cult leader with a complicated past, and maybe some rage issues. But I think she operates from a place of deep conviction, and believes that her actions are for the greater good.

• This is a road trip play, and the leaves are starting to change, so we have to ask: What’s your favorite place to go for a quick road trip getaway on the east coast?

For a complete change of scene a little over an hour from the city, I'm going to have to go with Cold Spring. You can drive up historic Route 9D, but for the car impaired, Metro-North also takes you right there. I lived there for a year. It was lovely; the commute every day just wore me down after a while. But when the leaves are changing, the fog's rolling on the Hudson in the morning, the hum of passing boats and trains are bouncing around Crow's Nest and Storm King mountains across the way, and you've got a mug of coffee in your hands and a date with a kayak, it's just kind of magical.

• What’s your favorite work by Edgar Allen Poe? You know you have one.

I’m rolling with “The Raven.”

• And while we’re on the subject: Crustaceans. Friend or food? Allergies? Assuming you eat them, which is your favorite one to eat? Any restaurants we need to know about?

I’m kind of a big fan of anything that comes out of the ocean looking like an armored car; it's usually protecting something delicious. In the city, I’m partial to Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, Cull and Pistol at Chelsea Market, and Lobster Place right next door.

• Are you working on any additional projects at the moment? Is it something you can tell us about?

There is some talk of Boomerang Theatre Company reprising Johnna Adams’ verse play Lickspittles, Buttonholers, and Damned Pernicious Go-Betweens next year, and I'm excited about that. There’s also a film project that I’m super stoked about, but I can’t talk about it quite yet (details soon, I promise – keep an eye on my website). Other than that, my fellow Wide Eyed company member and buddy Andrew Harriss has informed me that I’m bringing brussels sprouts to potluck Thanksgiving. So I guess that’s my next big thing.

Meet the DEAD SPECIAL CRABS Cast: Greg Carere

Greg Carere is a New York-based, Canadian-born actor and writer. New York credits include: The Downtown Loop (3LD), If You Can Get To Buffalo (Incubator Arts Project), The Party Play (The Brick), The Grass is Greenest at the Houston Astrodome (FringeNYC), King John (The New Ensemble Workshop). Regional credits: Merchant of Venice, Pericles, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Twelfth Night (Shakespeare by the Sea), Rudy vs the World (OLS). He holds an MFA from The New School for Drama. Love to his family, friends, and Rose.

• You’ll be performing in our upcoming world premiere production of Dead Special Crabs. What was your history with the piece before coming on board for the full production (if any)? Could you tell us a little bit about your last project?

I didn’t really have a history with Dead Special Crabs before I auditioned, but I’ve been friends with and a fan of both Dan Kitrosser and Kristin Skye Hoffmann for the past few years since they showed up at The New School for Drama. I’ve helped out a little with Wide Eyed WINKS, from whence Dead Special Crabs had an early reading, and I was really excited to have a chance to work with Dan and Kristin and the company.

My last project was with Fringe NYC and Outside/Inside: The Grass is Greenest at the Houston Astrodome, by Michael Ross Albert (who, actually, now that I think about it, also has a bit of a history with Wide Eyed). It’s a tight little dramatic comedy about a group of artists in the aftermath of a gala, in which one of the artists had a psychotic break and destroyed almost every piece in the show. I played Marshall, a painter who’s trying to find his identity in the wake of his father’s death, and whose work was the catalyst for the aforementioned psychotic break.

I mentioned it was a comedy, yes?

• How are rehearsals going? Can you tell us a little bit about the character you’ll be playing in Dead Special Crabs, and your favorite thing about this role? (No spoilers!)

Rehearsals are going terribly! Kristin is a tyrant! Dan is a talentless hack! The rest of the cast are all hideous trolls who wouldn’t know acting if it walked up and stabbed them in the gut! My character, Virgil, is a depressed misanthrope and I can’t seem to break character! My favorite thing about this role is NOTHING! NOTHING MATTERS!

• This is a road trip play, and the leaves are starting to change, so we have to ask: What’s your favorite place to go for a quick road trip getaway on the east coast?

I don’t get to take quick road trips all that often, but I was just on Bear Mountain to watch two of my very good friends get married, and so if I was going to recommend anything, I’d say go watch two very good friends get married on Bear Mountain in the fall.

• What’s your favorite work by Edgar Allen Poe? You know you have one.

It’s probably a little cliche, but it’s hard to deny “The Tell-Tale Heart”. It so perfectly captures madness and obsession and guilt, and the sequence where the narrator creeps into the old man’s room and opens the shutter of his lantern to have the beam fall on the eye (the eye!) has stuck with me since I was a kid. But, in some ways, I think “The Cask of Amontillado” captures a lot of the horror and obsession of “The Tell-Tale Heart” in a tighter, more efficient story.

• And while we’re on the subject: Crustaceans. Friend or food? Allergies? Assuming you eat them, which is your favorite one to eat? Any restaurants we need to know about?

Friend AND foe! My favorite one to eat is ALL OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME, but if I had to choose, I would probably say lobster. And, speaking of which, the Red Hook Lobster Pound (which has locations in Red Hook, on the LES, and at Smorgasburg) does just about the best lobster roll I’ve ever had.

• When did you know that you wanted to be an actor? How did you get started?

I don’t know if I really knew that I wanted to be an actor until somewhere near the end of my time at grad school, where I was getting an MFA in Acting. It wouldn’t be exactly fair to say I fell into it, but it was certainly something that kept pulling at me despite my best efforts to ignore it. I got “started” when I took a drama class in high school, because I needed an arts credit and thought it would be a bird course. And then I ended up majoring in theater in college, despite enrolling in a university without knowing they even offered theater. And then, after I graduated, I spent a lot of time trying to be a freelance writer and working as an administrative assistant in a government office before finally applying to grad schools, primarily as a playwright. Even The New School for Drama, where I ended up going to study acting, I had originally applied to as a playwright. Acting hunted me down, and I don’t know if I really gave in until just a few years ago, and at that point I’d been doing it on and off for 10 years. 

• Who or what do you consider to have been your biggest creative influences to date? Why?

I’d say the people I met while at NSD, both students and teachers. It was a wonderful little laboratory, full of mad scientists, and everything, every breakthrough and mistake and blank out and triumph, that anyone made, was something that I learned from and that influenced me, and I’m guessing will continue to do so for a long time.

• Are you working on any additional projects at the moment? Is it something you can tell us about?

Yes! A number of things! But almost none of which I can talk about! There are a couple of plays in development, and a TV pilot, and maybe a movie. But most imminently: keep an eye out for Hazard Rep’s first production, Cliff by Ryan Feyk. We’re developing it right now, and I think it’s going to be something special.