Studio Visits are evening-length hybrid performance events, offering audiences a multi-angled view of the featured artist and their craft. Each Studio Visit includes an introduction by the artist, a presentation of new work-in-process, a critical response essay by a guest artist, and a Q&A. The guest artist for this Studio Visit is Jess Barbagallo.

All Long True American Stories is an epic play-cycle in which writer Julia May Jonas reimagines canonical American male-experience plays for other people (mostly women). Developed with director/producer Sarah Hughes and consisting of five new full-length plays (responding to All My Sons by Arthur Miller, Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill, True West by Sam Shepard, American Buffalo by David Mamet, and Zoo Story by Edward Albee). All Long True American Stories gleefully ignores patriarchal constraints to create a more expansive conception of the American Canon. At PRELUDE, Jonas & Hughes are showing an excerpt of A Woman Among Women, a play with music in response to Arthur Miller’s All My Sons that wonders what happens when we raise our daughters to be too confident. With music composed by Brian Cavanagh-Strong, the play looks at Miller’s adoption of Greek theater and archetypes, the use of these archetypes in the theater of group therapy, and the place of catharsis in both our current theatrical landscape and our consciousness.

Julia May Jonas is a playwright, director, and founder of the theater company Nellie Tinder. She creates original performance that combines formal innovation with moral investigation and blends text, music, and movement to create a unique live experience that rests on its own intrinsic norms. Julia is an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, co-leader of the NG Jam, a 2018 Artist-in-Residence with Target Margin Theater and a 2018-2020 Ars Nova Playgroup member. She teaches playwriting at Skidmore College.

Sarah Hughes is a director and producer of theater and new media. Her work embraces limitation, values accidental discoveries, and is deeply collaborative. Sarah worked with Elevator Repair Service from 2007-14 and was Artistic Producer at Target Margin Theater from 2015-17, and is a 2018 New Georges Audrey Resident, a 2017-18 Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellowship Recipient, and a 2018-2020 WP Theater Directors Lab Member. Upcoming Oct 20-Nov 4: Cara Scarmack’s some higher glimmer in our landscape of flat at The Collapsable Hole. 

Julia and Sarah came together through a shared interest in exploring theatrical conventions and storytelling tropes of earlier eras through a modern, feminist lens. Their work is characterized by humor and a theatricality that moves in and out of naturalism.

Music Composition & Direction: Brian Cavanagh-Strong
Cast: Kim Gainer, Zoë Geltman, David Gould, Hannah Heller, Lucy Kaminsky, Christina Rouner, Kate Schroeder, and more

Special Thanks to NACL, The Bushwick Starr, New Georges, and Great Plains Theater Conference for their development support.

Jess Barbagallo is a writer, director, performer, arts journalist and teacher based in New York City. Playwriting credits include: Not for Resale (in collaboration with Lex Powell and the NYU Drama Therapy program); Melissa, So Far; My Old Man (and Other Stories); Sentence Fetish; Joe Ranono’s Yuletide Log and Other Fruitcakes; Karen Davis Does …; Good Year for Hunters; Room for Cream: A Live Lesbian Serial; Saturn Nights; and Grey-Eyed Dogs. He is currently acting in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Lyric Theatre.

Upcoming

A Woman Among Women will be presented as part of the All Long True American Stories five-play rep cycle in the 2019-2020 season.
Other plays in the cycle will be workshopped over the next year at Skidmore College, The Bushwick Starr, New Georges, Ars Nova and more.

www.nellietinder.org; www.sarahcameronhughes.com