Cave Canem Brings the Drama Benefit Performance Oct 24

Here at the Millay Colony we adore Cave Canem in so many ways. Co-founder Cornelius Eady is a Millay alum, just for starters. As many of you know, we have a dedicated residency for a Cave Canem fellow every year. Well, we could go on, but would rather spend this time directing your attention to the benefit performance to support CC's incredible doings.

Here are the details:

a performance to benefit CAVE CANEM
directed by TED SOD
MAHOGANY L. BROWNE emcees

featuring:
... SUZZANNE DOUGLAS performing selections from FLED by MAY JOSEPH
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TRACIE MORRIS performing selections from EXISTING CONDITIONS by CLAUDIA RANKINE and CASEY LLEWELLYN
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LILI TAYLOR performing a monologue from STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN by JESSICA HAGEDORN
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SAMANTHA MAURICE and JOHN DOUGLAS THOMPSON performing selections from BRUTAL IMAGINATION by CORNELIUS EADY


||| TICKETS |||
General Seating $40
VIP Tickets $125 - $500
Visit our website to purchase your tickets today!
http://www.cavecanempoets.org/benefit
||| PERFORMERS |||

Actress, singer, director and producer SUZZANNE DOUGLAS has appeared on Broadway in The Threepenny Opera, It’s a Grand Night for Singing, The Tap Dance Kid and Into the Woods. Off‐Broadway, she recently appeared in the premiere of Kara Lee Corthron’s Julius by Design. She has won two NAACP Image Awards for her performances in, respectively, Tap, alongside Sammy Davis, Jr. and Gregory Hines, and Regina Taylor’s play Crowns. She co‐starred with Robert Townsend in the Warner Brothers’ family sitcom The Parent ’Hood, and has appeared in several critically acclaimed television shows, including The Good Wife and NYPD Blue.

Currently appearing in productions of The Grasshopper Way and The Winterʹs Tale, SAMANTHA MAURICE has been acting since playing the role of Molly in Annie at age six. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and also studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Ms. Maurice recently performed as a dancer in Ray Bradbury’s musical 2116 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

TRACIE MORRIS is an interdisciplinary poet who has worked extensively as a sound artist, writer, actor, academic and multimedia performer. She is the author of the poetry collection Chap-T-her Won and five forthcoming projects: two books of creative writing, a collection of critical writing, and two recording projects—sharpmorris (with Elliott Sharp) and Introducing the Tracie Morris Band. She is Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.

LILI TAYLOR has appeared in dozens of films since 1988, including Dogfight, Mystic Pizza and Rudy. She is well known for playing the lead role of Valerie Solanas in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol and for her portrayal of Lisa Kimmel Fisher in the Emmy- and Golden Globe- winning HBO drama Six Feet Under. Ms. Taylor received the 2005 Best Actress award at the Copenhagen International Film Festival for her role in Factotum.

JOHN DOUGLAS THOMPSON has been called “one of the most compelling classical stage actors of his generation,”winning Obie and Lucille Lortel awards for his portrayal of Othello with Theater for a New Audience. He has performed in such modern classics as Cyrano de Bergerac on Broadway and Hedda Gabler at the New York Workshop Theater; and he played the lead role in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones at the Irish Repertory Theater.

||| DIRECTOR |||

TED SOD's directorial credits include, among others, How To Be A Good Italian Daughter in Spite of Myself, (Cherry Lane Theatre); Blood Type: Ragu (Actors’ Playhouse/Capital Rep); By Jupiter (York Theatre Co.); Agnes of God; A Night In Tunisia; Talley’s Folly; Wit (George Street Playhouse) and Who Popped Poppi Chulo? and Scarlet Sees the Light for the New York City Fringe Festival. He is the librettist of the musicals The Cousins Grimm and 27, Rue de Fleurus; and produced, wrote and acted in Crocodile Tears, an independent feature. Other works written for the stage include Stealing, Damaged Goods, Salon, The Kiss, A Rude Awakening, Satan and Simon Desoto and The Lost Art of Conversation. He has acted in plays produced by The Public Theatre, The Culture Project, Second Stage, Playwrightsʹ
Horizons, American Place Theatre, BAM Theatre Company, the Circle, Seattle and Yale Repertory Companies, among others; and has appeared in the television series Bored To Death, Nurse Jackie, Ugly Betty, Law and Order, Law and Order: Criminal Intent and Law and Order: SVU. Mr. Sod is currently dramaturge for the education department at The Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City.

||| POETS & PLAYWRIGHTS |||

CORNELIUS EADY is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Hardheaded Weather (Penguin, 2008). His Victims of the Latest Dance Craze received the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Running Man, a jazz opera with a score by Diedre Murray and libretto by Eady, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama; and a production of Brutal Imagination won the 2002 Oppenheimer award for the best first play by an American playwright. With Toi Derricotte, he is co-founder of Cave Canem. He is Professor of English and the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

JESSICA HAGEDORN's novels include Dream Jungle; The Gangster Of Love, nominated for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize; Dogeaters, nominated for a National Book Award; and Toxicology, forthcoming from Viking Penguin in 2011. Recent work in theatre includes the musical play Most Wanted, a collaboration with composer Mark Bennett and director Michael Greif; Fe in The Desert and Stairway to Heaven; and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters, which was presented at the NYSF/Public Theater, in Manila and elsewhere. Ms. Hagedorn is the Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn.

MAY JOSEPH is a puppeteer, theater director and the founder of Harmattan Theater in New York City. The author of Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (1999), she currently is completing a play, Fled, and a book on urban citizenship, Metro Lives: Performing the City. She is Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute.

CASEY LLEWELLYN is a theater artist whose work interrogates identity and form. Excerpts of her play The Quiet Way have been presented as part of the Little Theatre series and Puppet BloK at Dixon Place. She has performed in and written for David Neumann's work at Barnard College and was seen last year at The Tank in All you need is one good idea, son, choreographed by Yve Laris Cohen.

CLAUDIA RANKINE has published four collections of poetry, most recently Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Her plays include the revelatory Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, called an “elegant meditation on a pocket of the city you might never think of exploring with guidebook in hand” by The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood; and Existing Conditions (with Casey Llewellyn), a full-length work exploring race, gender and nation building. A recipient of the Cleveland State Poetry Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation and elsewhere, she is the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.

||| EMCEE |||

Cave Canem fellow MAHOGANY L. BROWNE is the author of several books, including Swag and Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On‐line. She has released five LPs, is the co‐founder of the Off Broadway poetry production Jam On It, and co‐producer of New York City’s SoundBites Poetry Festival. She is an Urban Word New York City mentor; publisher of Penmanship Books, a small press for performance artists; a freelance journalist; and host and curator of Friday Night Slam at New York City’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe.See More

http://www.cavecanempoets.org/benefit