For Immediate Release
Contact: Jenn Adams
Associate Artistic Director, Halcyon Theatre
773.413.0454 
press@halcyontheatre.org
halcyontheatre.org  

Halcyon Theatre Announces The Fifth Annual Alcyone Festival Featuring New Works by Mexican Women

CHICAGO, IL (May 16, 2011) Halcyon Theatre Announces the fifth annual Alcyone Festival featuring new works in translation by Mexican women. The Alcyone Festival 2012 will be performed at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.  From July 12 through August 12.

The Alcyone Festival 2012 will feature works (in English translation) by women in Mexico. There is a long and distinguished body of  theatrical work in Mexico. Unfortunately, many of these works are rarely seen in Chicago.  With this year's Alcyone Festival, Halcyon is presenting four plays in translation by some of Mexico's best playwrights.

Says Artistic Director Tony Adams, “I was really inspired by some of the works that Henry Godinez and the Lark brought to the Goodman's last Latino Theatre Festival for readings, so for this year's festival I wanted to continue that conversation and present full productions of some fantastic plays by Mexican women. The fact that Henry will be directing with us is pretty amazing. Not just because he introduced me to some of the writers, but he is one of my favorite artists in the country. A large part of our work revolves around the idea of connection, and so I'm also really excited to reconnect with another director in this year's fest, Alex Gualino. Alex was one of the founding members of Steep theatre, where I was a longtime member, and I worked with him on my first show in Chicago.” 

Performances will be Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30, and Sundays at 2:30, in rotating rep, from July 12 through August 12, 2012. Tickets are $12-20, and are available through the Greenhouse Theater box office at greenhousetheater.org or at 773.404.7336.  Festival passes are available for $75. 

Members of the media are invited to attend any performance.  

This year's festival features:  

A Lover’s Dismantling: Fragments of a Scenic Discourse
by Elena Guiochins, translation by Andy Bragen
Directed by Alex Gualino
"There are only two kinds of thoughts: memories and imagination. This story of two couples finding, living, and losing love wanders whimsically through time, distance, dreams, and heartbreak. "

Freud Skating
by Sabina Berman, translation by Kirsten F. Nigro
Directed by Henry Godinez
"A dramatic rewriting of the famous case of Freud's "Dora."

Two Dead Guys and a Banjo: A Story of Mourning
by Mariana Hartasánchez, tranlation by Henry Guzmán
Directed by Ebony Joy
"When a magician's hand escapes and seduces a psychiatrist, two fathers return from the dead in a battle of rhetoric and illusion over the living. "

The Tip of the Iceberg
by Bea Carmina, translation by Caridad Svich
Directed by Anneliese Moffitt
"A couple on the skids, a woman having a nervous breakdown, a serial killer on the prowl and a girl holding onto a mewling cat make up the darkly, comic poetically ferocious world of The Tip of the Iceberg."

*exact lineup subject to change

About the Alcyone Festival:

Now in its fifth year, our annual Alcyone Festival celebrates female playwrights. Women writers are grossly underepresented on stages across America, so we created the Alcyone Festival to combat this directly, by celebrating the depth and breadth of women writing for the stage. To date the Alcyone Festival has presented 26 works by women, only two of which had previously been seen in Chicago.

For our first annual Alcyone Festival, in the summegrossly underrepresentedr of 2008, Halcyon Theatre produced the works of 10 early female playwrights spanning almost 1000 years in rotating repertory. These works have been seldom (and mostly never) seen on contemporary stages.

For the Alcyone Festival 2009 we decided to play with the notion that women only write small domestic dramas, picking a theme as far away from that as possible: terrorism, the cult of martyrdom and its effects upon the innocents.  The Alcyone Festival 2009 featured six phenomenal writers from across the globe.

The Alcyone Festival 2010 celebrates the work of María Irene Fornés.

The theme for the Alcyone Festival 2011 was Remixed, creating new works by women based off of classical texts by women. We presented five new works using/adapting/sampling/re-envisioning . . . remixing classical plays written by women from Hrosvita (c. 935 to c. 1002) through 1800. The Alcyone Festival 2011 celebrated both new and (really) old writers and showed how the lineage of female playwrights over the past thousand years can inspire and inform contemporary audiences and artists.

The Alcyone Festival 2012 will feature new works in translation by Mexican women.

About Halcyon:  

Mission- We are fiercely committed to making the stage as diverse as the city of Chicago; presenting new voices from inadequately represented communities, as well as recasting classic works to showcase their contemporary relevance. 

About- Halcyon Theatre was formed to connect people, transform our borders and ascend towards a more  just union. We strive to make incredible theatre from stories around the world, to help show our world in new ways, and rediscover the individual beauty of people from our global community. Our artistic philosophy is driven by our continuing belief that at every point of human history where there has been an explosion of artistic creativity, it has happened when different cultures and traditions have intersected and informed each other.  If every artist working with an organization looks and thinks the same, it is difficult for them to grow. A homogeneous group produces homogeneous art. Striving for artistic excellence with artists of varied cultural backgrounds and training is at the forefront of everything we do. 

# # # # MEDIA ALERT * MEDIA ALERT * MEDIA ALERT * MEDIA ALERT  

WHAT:  Halcyon Theatre Announces The Fifth Annual Alcyone Festival Featuring New Works by Mexican Women. 

WHERE: The Alcyone Festival 2012 will be performed at the Greenhouse Theatre Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. 

WHEN: The Alcyone Festival 2012 will play Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30, and Sundays at 2:30, in rotating rep. 

ADMISSION: $12-20 for single tickets.  Festival Passes are available for $75.   

BOX OFFICE: Tickets are available through the Greenhouse Theater box office at greenhousetheater.org or at 773.404.7336. 

FEATURING:

A Lover’s Dismantling: Fragments of a Scenic Discourse
by Elena Guiochins, translation by Andy Bragen
Directed by Alex Gualino
"There are only two kinds of thoughts: memories and imagination. This story of two couples finding, living, and losing love wanders whimsically through time, distance, dreams, and heartbreak. "

Freud Skating
by Sabina Berman, translation by Kirsten F. Nigro
Directed by Henry Godinez
"A dramatic rewriting of the famous case of Freud's "Dora."

Two Dead Guys and a Banjo: A Story of Mourning
by Mariana Hartasánchez, translation by Henry Guzmán
Directed by Ebony Joy
"When a magician's hand escapes and seduces a psychiatrist, two fathers return from the dead in a battle of rhetoric and illusion over the living. "

The Tip of the Iceberg
by Bea Carmina, translation by Caridad Svich
Directed by Anneliese Moffitt
"A couple on the skids, a woman having a nervous breakdown, a serial killer on the prowl and a girl holding onto a mewling cat make up the darkly, comic poetically ferocious world of The Tip of the Iceberg."

*exact lineup subject to change

WEBSITE: halcyontheatre.org ; halcyontheatre.org/alcyone12

CONTACT: Jenn Adams
Associate Artistic Director, Halcyon Theatre
773.413.0454  
press@halcyontheatre.org
halcyontheatre.org