Description of Festival Pieces

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Sunday, May 16, 3:00 PM

Breathing Mars by Timothy Huang and Liz Duffy Adams

An imperialistic spaceman is marooned on Mars. The lone survivor of a botched mission, he’s still proud to have planted the American flag on the red planet and become “the first Martian…” until he meets a real one.
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Far Away from America by Josh H Cohen and Lavell V Blackwell

John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, and the ghost of Mike Spann, the first American soldier killed in Afghanistan, battle in Lindh’s prison cell over what truly happened during their brief meeting, and over what it means to be American.
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Gotcha by Ben Toth, Maryrose Wood; directed by Issac Robert Hurwitz

In this chilling, ten-minute musical drama, a boy is gradually forced to reveal how his favorite teacher ended up shot in the parking lot. As his GameBoy bleeps in the background, the boy tells his shrink how it all started with a frog dissection gone wrong...
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Sunday, May 16, 5:30 PM

Leading Lady by Kevin March and Kim Yaged

Leading Lady is based on the life and death of the 1930’s Hollywood starlet Peg Entwhistle, taking jabs at everything from the sexual objectification of women to the media’s current delight and obsession with global chaos.
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Sunday, May 16, 8:00 PM

Best by Eamonn Farrell, Masi Asare, Jim Iseman, Andrea Davey

The Best is waging a constant pop performance battle against war obsessed government forces. The Best uses rock and electronic music, digital entities, hot dancing, circus performance, reality video scenes, and live broadcast as its primary weapons.
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MAPS by David Hilder and Gilles Chiasson; directed by Andrew Volkoff

Everyone's road to love takes some unexpected turns; Amanda and Lynn's is no exception. From a first date to a tense roadtrip to a surprising subway ride, follow this oddly/perfectly matched couple as they try to find their way home.
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Lynn Book's The LOOP Group

The LOOP Group is a gaggle of artists inventing new performance for voice that may not shatter glasses but definitely rearranges your molecules. This crew is formed by wildly divergent emerging artists who mix and mingle media with considered abandon.
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Sunday, May 23, 4:00 PM

Sad Damn the Musical by Mitch Kess

9-11. What was Saddam Hussein doing on that infamous day? He was writing his second novel. His first novel was being turned into a musical. This is Saddam's story exposed through rock music and his relationship with the Bush Dynasty.
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Field Trip by Robert Quillen Camp

Two short performance operas, “Kindness” and “Timetable,” employ surreal narratives about modern transportation to examine ideas of personal and collective progress. They combine voice and stereo field recordings with a live-triggered computer-driven score.
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Sunday, May 23, 7:00 PM

Music for Fifty Carpenters by Doug Henderson

A theatrical surround sound work enlisting 50 skilled tradespeople. Prying at Stockhausen’s line between rhythm and timbre, 50 hammers, and 4000 nails are brought to bear. Hammer blows become waves of tonal murmur threaded with rustlings of nails in bags and occasional snarls of righteous indignation.
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The Merry Swinger Show by Michelle Feldman and James Jannucci

A raucous Springer-style talk show version of the 2000 election scandal. Cheney gives a beat-down to troublesome audience members while Dubya refuses to pay child support for the deficit and Gore blubbers helplessly in the corner.
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An Evening at The Trojan Hotel by Anthony Prezio

Anthony Prezio’s family has been in the restaurant business in downtown Troy since the 1930’s. An Evening at The Trojan Hotel Bar is a musical based on the memories, characters and stories he has collected over the years.
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