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Rick Miramontez / Elizabeth Wagner / Chelsea Nachman
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE

New York, NY – SummerStage has announced the continuation of their first theater season with Five Days in March, written by Toshiki Okada, translated by Aya Ogawa and performed by Witness Relocation. This show is a part of SummerStage’s summer-long FREE theater program and will take place on Monday, August 23 and Tuesday, August 24 at East River Park, Manhattan at 8:00 p.m.

Five Days in March by Toshiki Okada is set in the days before the U.S. began its war against Iraq in March 2003. Minobe meets Yukki at a rock show. Their awkward conversation leads to five days of wild sex in a love hotel. Azuma sells Miffy a ticket to a bad movie. Miffy thinks Azuma doesn't return her feelings, so she decides to move to Mars. Yasui and Ishihara go on the anti-war protest. The police escort's uniforms elicit more comment than the war itself. Oblivious to the imminent invasion of Iraq, these hipsters obsess over the details of their lives, perfectly capturing the irony and impotency of Generation Y in Japan today. The story unfolds through actors who slip in and out of character while also narrating and playing out scenes. The play, a winner of the prestigious Kishida Kunio Drama Award, is at once funny, sad, anticlimactic and devastating.

“Five Days in March is an interesting dichotomy of emotions. On one side, there is the main characters’ total emotional disconnect from a war affecting thousands of people and on the other hand there is a fierce interest in what will only affect the lives of two people”, said City Park Foundation’s Director of Theater Programs, Freedome Bradley. “We wanted to include this important work in order to make the audience think about their emotional relationship to our turbulent global society as well as to reflect upon the themes of loneliness that are discussed within the play.”

The full cast of Five Days in March includes Heather Christian, Sean Donovan, Chris Giarmo, Mike Mikos, Wil Petre, Kourtney Rutherford and Laura Berlin Stinger.

The creative team for Five Days in March includes Dan Safer (Director/Choreographer), Obie Award-Winner Dave Malloy (Music), Jay Ryan (Set Design/Lighting Design), Deb O (Costume Design), Ryan Maeker (Sound Design), Kaz Phillips (Projections) and Phillip Gulley (Dramaturg).

Praise for Five Days in March:

“Five Days In March is serious fun.”
– Culturebot

“Safer's spoken-English, American pop-culture version opens up, punches up and clarifies Five Days with a visually and aurally gorgeous production and with outrageously capacious, perversely genius performances”
– Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody Blog

“a lingua franca for the 21st century”
– Backstage

This year in honor of the 25th anniversary, SummerStage is excited to have expanded from Central Park to encompass all five boroughs, and will feature productions in Von King Park, Brooklyn, Betsy Head Park, Brooklyn, St. Mary’s Park, Bronx, Crotona Park, Bronx, Springfield Park, Queens, Marcus Garvey Park, Manhattan and East River Park, Manhattan.

For the most up-to-date SummerStage scheduling and line-up for SummerStage programming, visit http://www.SummerStage.org.

Bios___________________________________________________________

Toshiki Okada (Playwright) practices a strange sort of methodology for creating plays. Even though he employs some, he nevertheless makes a point of “not getting too comfortable with any particular methodology or holding on to one style to the point where it holds him back.” Unique choreography, which borders has been compared to dance choreography, endows the actors with “noisy” corporeality, is a hallmark of Okada's plays. In 2005, his work, Five Days in March won the 49th Kishida Drama Award.

Witness Relocation is led by director/choreographer Dan Safer. Described by Performing Arts Journal as a “dance theater anarchist’s utopia”, the company has over a dozen original productions, performed a two year residency in Bangkok, and have performed in theaters, nightclubs, rock videos, and on a Thai TV Soap Opera. Recent productions include The Panic Show (DNA, Bumbershoot Festival, in France at Le Quartz), Haggadah (La Mama), Mikuni Yanahaira’s The Blue Bird (English language premiere), Vicious Dogs On Premises (which has toured across the US and Eastern Europe and will be presented at Theater de Chaillot in Paris next year), Dancing Vs. the Rat Experiment (three 2007 NY Innovative Theater Awards, Best Production, Sound, Choreography) and Thomas Lehmen’s Schriebstuck. Coming up: Heaven On Earth, an all new show written by the incredible Chuck Mee and performed in collaboration with French company Ildi! Eldi (developed at Les Subsistances in Lyon, France). SummerStage is proud to bring back this cutting edge theater company that enthralled audiences in 2009 with their play, Dancing Vs. the Rat Experiment.

City Parks Foundation (CPF) is the only independent, nonprofit organization to offer park programs throughout the five boroughs of New York City. CPF works in over 750 parks citywide, presenting a broad range of free arts, sports, and education programs, and empowering citizens to support their parks on a local level. CPF programs and community building initiatives reach more than 600,000 people each year, contributing to the revitalization of neighborhoods throughout New York City.

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