Every day is opening night.

Williamstown Theatre Festival & Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club Contact:
Rick Miramontez / Aaron Meier
rick@omdkc.com / aaron@omdkc.com
212 695 7400

Audible Theater Contact:
Chris Boneau / Michelle Farabaugh
cboneau@bbbway.com / mfarabaugh@bbbway.com

Jessica Shoffel / Dana Honor
shoffel@audible.com / dhonor@audible.com 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE

“CHONBURI INTERNATIONAL HOTEL
& BUTTERFLY CLUB”
WORLD PREMIERE WRITTEN BY SHAKINA NAYFACK
DIRECTED BY LAURA SAVIA 

PRESENTED AS PART OF THE
2020 WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL SEASON
ON AUDIBLE THEATER 

IS AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 29 AT 3 AM ET
ON AUDIBLE PLUS

New York, NY (December 22, 2020) – The Williamstown Theatre Festival (Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director) and Audible Theater (Kate Navin, Artistic Producer) world premiere presentation of Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club is available worldwide Tuesday, December 29 at 3 AM ET within the Audible Plus catalog. Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club is part of the 2020 Williamstown Theatre Festival summer season produced on Audible, the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling.

Written by Shakina Nayfack and directed by WTF Associate Artistic Director Laura Savia, Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club features a cast that includes nine actors of trans experience. The complete cast features the playwright, Shakina Nayfack, alongside Ivory Aquino, Kate Bornstein, Liz Lark Brown, Samy Figaredo, SAG Award^® winner Annie Golden, Bianca Leigh, Telly Leung, Dana Aliya Levinson, Pooya Mohseni, Angelica Ross, Ita Segev, and Grammy Award^® nominee Jason Tam.

In Shakina Nayfack’s world premiere play, a vibrant, international group of transgender women band together at a hotel in Thailand to confront the challenges and joys of gender confirmation surgery. Despite the group’s warm welcome, Kina (Shakina Nayfack) prepares for her life-altering operation all alone. But a caring nurse (Ivory Aquino), a wise couple (Kate Bornstein and Annie Golden), and a karaoke-loving bellhop (Telly Leung) may be exactly who she needs to ignite her truest sense of self. WTF Associate Artistic Director Laura Savia directs this spirited comedy about one woman who tests the bonds of an unlikely sisterhood.

The creative team also includes Joanna Fang (sound design), Barbara Rubin and Joy Lanceta Coronel (dialect coaches), Riw Rakkulchon (cultural competence consultant), and Charlie Barnett IV (assistant director).

Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club’s running time is approximately one hour, forty-five minutes.

Special access to all seven titles in the WTF Season on Audible will be made available to eligible WTF donors; visit www.wtfestival.org/support for more information.

Forged during and in response to a fraught moment in history, the unprecedented collaboration between Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible Theater preserves the Festival season in a different format, provides continued work for the artists involved in the Festival season, and produces a body of work that will be made available for global Audible listeners to enjoy and experience. It also marks the first time that a theatrical season of work will be produced on Audible.

The rest of WTF’s 2020 season on Audible includes the Tennessee Williams masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire, Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler, and Animals by Stacy Osei-Kuffour – all available now. Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue; the world premiere musical Row with a book by Daniel Goldstein and music & lyrics by Dawn Landes; and Sanaz Toossi’s world premiere Wish You Were Here will be released in 2021.

For more information about Williamstown Theatre Festival, please visit www.wtfestival.org. For more information about Audible, please visit www.audible.com.

ABOUT WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL

For over six decades, Williamstown Theatre Festival, recipient of the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre and the Commonwealth Award for Achievement, has brought emerging and professional theatre artists together to create a thrilling summer festival of premiere work alongside fresh, new productions of the western canon, accompanying cultural events including COMMUNITY WORKS and Late- Night Cabarets, and readings and workshops of new plays. Under Artistic Director Mandy Greenfield, WTF launched the Andrew Martin-Weber New Play and Musical Commissioning Program, through which theatre artists, including Jocelyn Bioh, Nathan Alan Davis, Halley Feiffer, Justin Levine, Matthew Lopez, Benjamin Scheuer, and many others, create new work supported by a year-round play development program. WTF runs unmatched training programs for new generations of theatre talent, and artists and productions shaped at WTF fill theatres in New York, London, and around the country each season. Williamstown Theatre Festival’s productions of The Bridges of Madison County, The Elephant Man, Fool for Love, Living on Love, and The Visit enjoyed critically acclaimed runs on Broadway, with The Elephant Man and The Visit receiving Tony Award nominations for Best Revival of a Play and Best Musical, respectively. WTF’s world premiere productions of Cost of Living (winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), Actually, Paradise Blue, and Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow played acclaimed Off-Broadway runs. In the abbreviated 2019-20 theatrical season, Williamstown Theatre Festival was represented or scheduled to be represented on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally by The Sound Inside and Grand Horizons, both of which received Tony Award nominations for Best Play, The Rose Tattoo, Seared, Selling Kabul, Unknown Soldier, and Lempicka.

ABOUT AUDIBLE THEATER

Audible Theater makes outstanding performances and powerful storytelling available to millions of people all over the world. As part of this initiative, Audible has produced Girls & Boys with Carey Mulligan, The Half-Life of Marie Curie with Kate Mulgrew, Harry Clarke starring Billy Crudup, Billy Crystal’s Have A Nice Day with Annette Bening and Kevin Kline, the revival of Aasif Mandvi’s Sakina’s Restaurant, and many others at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City. In May 2018, Audible announced that the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village will serve as its creative home for live performances in New York. Audible hosts and produces a wide variety of live performances at the Minetta Lane including dramatic plays, comedic shows, engaging panel discussions, and more, with Audible members receiving exclusive access to discounted tickets and related audio content.

Audible was co-producer for the Broadway transfer of the Tony Award-nominated Latin History for Morons written by and starring John Leguizamo and for Sea Wall /A Life starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge. The initiative also saw the release of John Lithgow’s Stories By Heart, Judith Light’s All The Ways To Say I Love You, Sharon Washington’s Feeding The Dragon, and more. Since June 2017, Audible has commissioned 40 theater playwrights to receive support from its $5 million Emerging Playwrights Fund dedicated to developing innovative English-language works from around the globe. The $5 million fund enables the creation of original plays driven by language and voice, keeping with Audible’s core commitment to elevating listening experiences through powerful performances and extraordinary vocal storytelling.

Audible, Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary (NASDAQ:AMZN), is the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling, offering customers a new way to enhance and enrich their lives every day. Audible content includes more than 575,000 audio programs from leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers.

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