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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CINCINNATI PLAYHOUSE IN THE PARK ANNOUNCES LINEUP FOR ALTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE SERIES (CINCINNATI) – The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park’s 2007 alteractive schedule is a diverse mix of nationally acclaimed favorites and up-and-coming local artists. The Playhouse’s one-of-a-kind Monday evening series returns for a seventh season on February 19 with six weeks of inventive and innovative performance art. alteractive brings the best of alternative artists, including monologists, performance poets and musicians to Playhouse audiences. Shows are staged in the intimate cabaret-style setting of the Rosenthal Plaza. Doors open for alteractive at 6:30 p.m., with performances starting around 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for students. The series is sponsored by Mercedes-Benz of Cincinnati. Immensely popular performance artist and gay activist Tim Miller kicks off the season with a fourth alteractive appearance, this time featuring his brand new show titled 1001 Beds, which actually has Cincinnati origins. This raucous and rowdy exploration of Mr. Miller's adventures in a performer's life chronicles his travels across love, politics and art. From a gay teen's head-on collision with life in a sleazy hotel across the street from the Hollywood Bowl to an ecstatic vision of a sex-positive future on a mattress in a police holding cell, 1001 Beds is a fiercely funny, sexy and border-crossing story about the transforming power of art. According to Mr. Miller, "If I continue to tour for another 20 years, as I have for the last 21, I will end up sleeping in at least 1000 hotel beds in my lifetime. For maximum poetic oomph, let's say 1001 beds. … They symbolize a life and art dedicated to reaching out toward folks from Bozeman to Tampa. A life and art that has traveled widely and, I believe, reached a couple hundred thousand people with my stories of queer life and love." One of those hotel beds can be found in room 626 at Cincinnati’s own Vernon Manor Hotel. In fact, Mr. Miller started writing the show while in Cincinnati for one of his previous alteractive performances. He said, “I titled the book 1001 Beds partly because I saw in so much of my work what a common thread the bed has been. These politics, our lives, our love, our spiritual selves, are forged between the sheets, in a way. So, this piece gets to jump forward from that metaphor by inviting the audience into four different stories about very specific beds where my truest self, my political self, resilient self, my partnered, married self, came forward.” Tim Miller is an internationally acclaimed performance artist and gay rights activist. He is the author of the books Body Blows and Shirts and Skin and his performance texts have appeared in the play collections O Solo Homo and Sharing the Delirium. Mr. Miller teaches performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Theater and is co-founder of Performance Space 122 in New York City and Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. The entire schedule includes: Your Negro Tour Guide Based on the writings of Cincinnati’s own award-winning columnist and commentator Kathy Y. Wilson, Your Negro Tour Guide is a provocative solo performance piece about identity in modern America. Through scathing and thoughtful rants, letters, music and nightmares, actress Torie Wiggins steers audiences through the modern black landscape of race, gender and class. Borrowing from spoken word, hip hop, cabaret and stand-up, this uncensored monologue is a searing, honest look at race. Kathy Y. Wilson is an award-winning writer and the former weekly columnist for CityBeat. Her commentaries also have been heard on NPR's All Things Considered. She has written for Newsday and has won awards from the Ohio Associated Press, the Association of Alternative Newspapers, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland. Slam Cincinnati Slam Cincinnati brings together some of the city’s best performance poets for a one-of-a-kind alteractive performance. The evening is coordinated by Cincinnati native Obalaye Macharia, who performs simply under the name Obalaye and is the founder of The Artistic Order of 144K. The group is a collaborative of spoken word artists, authors, playwrights, recording artists, producers, actors, singers and musicians who are, in their own words, “bombing spots with oral tags and spraying down audiences with lyrical graffiti.” The 144K performance ensemble tours extensively both in the United States and abroad. 144K’s art is about activism and change. In an interview, Obalaye explained, “Cincinnati got old problems, got them all deep down. It’s going to change. 144K is a part of that change ‘cause it’s so diverse, and it represents the diversity going on.” The group’s distinctively provocative and captivating style interchanges from the stage to the classroom and from recordings to print. Obalaye is also the author of the book Spoems and of the recording Spoems: Speak Easy and Speak Hard. Firecracker Natalie Sullivan, Stacey Hallal and Sarah Maher are the trio of ladies who perform as the sketch comedy and improvisational group Firecracker, which is also the title of their alteractive show. Firecracker began performing together in February 2005 and appearances have included the iO and Playground theatres. According to Time Out Chicago, “The scenes are funny, thanks to inventive characters placed in unusual situations. And the show’s worth seeing for hilarious Mr. Clean commercials and other great video tidbits interspersed throughout.” Stacey Hallal has performed and taught comedy at more than 25 international comedy festivals across the U.S. and Canada. In Chicago, she plays with Second City's house ensemble The Lordosis Effect, iO's Millies, in the duo sketch group Cusick and Hallal and in the groundbreaking improvisation show In Every Life, in which she and Mark Sutton improvise a comedy, a tragedy and a romance. Natalie Sullivan came to the Chicago improv scene from Florida in 2003. In addition to Firecracker, she performs improvisation with Lunch Club and sketch comedy with Johnny’s Regret. Sarah Maher performed at iO Chicago with Psychoplasmics, at the Playground Theater with Cowlick and with the children’s touring show Hogwash, in addition to directing the all-female improvisation team The Misfits. The Values Americans Live By The Values Americans Live By is presented by the Laboratory for Enthusiastic Collaboration (L.E.C.). A physical and funny performance piece, the show is based on the pamphlet of the same name, written by cultural anthropologist L. Robert Kohls in 1984, that articulated 13 American values — personal control over the environment, time and its control, competition, free enterprise and future orientation, among them — in an attempt to demystify the American people for foreign visitors. The show first was performed for The Delhi Alternative Theatre Festival in Delhi, India, in 2004, while the North American premiere took place in collaboration with the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Los Angeles later that year. The L.E.C. has endeavored to “cultivate ecstasy through physical theatre” since 1996. According to its web site, the L.E.C. “explores the practice of audiences and performers as they converge on an undefined point. That point in physical space and the narrative frame of the event are treated as variable conditions in laboratory experiments made possible only in collaboration with the audience.” Simone Perrin Sings Songs of Love and Love Lost with Her Accordion Pixie Acclaimed at this past year’s Minnesota Fringe Festival, performer Simone Perrin comes to alteractive with a new show: Simone Perrin Sings Songs of Love and Love Lost with Her Accordion Pixie. The performance combines an accordion, a voice that “packs a wallop,” a tale of a broken-hearted vampire and boots that were made for walkin’. Ms. Perrin recently returned to her home of Minnesota after graduating from Oberlin College/Conservatory and living for five years in New York City. There, she performed with Mettawee River Theater Company, the Main Squeeze Accordion Orchestra and the sketch comedy group Bad Astronauts. In Minneapolis, she has worked with Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Chicago Avenue Project, Playwrights Center, Thirst Theater, Theater Latte Da and Mixed Blood Theatre. This past summer, she and Pixie the accordion premiered two shows at the Fringe: her one-woman show Tall Tale of a Broken Heart and In Hopes of Claudia with Kevin Kling. alteractive performances may contain adult content and language. Please contact the box office for information regarding specific shows. Tickets for alteractive are on sale by calling the Playhouse box office at 513/421-3888 or toll-free in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, 800/582-3208. Parking is free. Happy Hour drink prices are available. To find more information about alteractive or to purchase tickets, visit www.cincyplay.com. Artists fly to and from Cincinnati on Delta Connection Comair, the Playhouse’s official airline. The Playhouse is supported, in part, by the generosity of the tens of thousands of individuals and businesses that give to the Fine Arts Fund. The Ohio Arts Council helps fund the Playhouse with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans. The Playhouse also receives funding from the City of Cincinnati. ### |