Like You - Staged Reading

Will Rosalind find true love with Orlando after she becomes Troy?

Like You, a new screenplay from Hudson Valley writer/director, Nicole Quinn, (Racing Daylight), will be read as part of the Rosendale Theatre’s Artist’s New Work Forum.

reading cast includes: 

Mary Stuart Masterson as Rosalind, Jeremy Davidson as Orlando, with Michael O’Keefe, and Julie Novak, along with Actors&Writers company members, Sarah Chodoff, Denny Dillon, Davis Hall, Mikhail Horowitz, Adam Lefevre, David Smilow, Joe White, and Lori Wilner. (subject to availability)

Adapted from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Like You is a contemporary gender bending romp set in the pastoral forest of Arden. A summer 2017 local movie shoot is planned.

Disguised as a man, Rosalind, and her cousin Celia, escape forced marriage and religious persecution to find sanctuary among hippies, red necks, and realtors in the forest of Arden. 

Come and participate in the development of an indie film script. Then follow the project from script to screen!

At the Rosendale Theatre, 408 Main St, Rosendale, NY, Tuesday September 27, 2016, 7:15 p.m. Admission is FREE! 

Like You - Staged Reading

At Play - Secret City

The amazing Chris Wells, impresario of The Secret City, invited me to celebrate in the worship of art this past weekend. The theme was "play". I am humbled and awed by the spirit of the service, like an old tent revival, but about something I truly believe in, the uplifting spirit of art.

Thank you, Chris,  for inviting me into The Secret City!

 




This is what I read:

I like to play. (Brit) “Sometimes I play at being foreign,” (EU) “Sorry, my English is not perfect,” usually in situations where the color of my skin tells a story which is not mine, when it casts me in a role I don’t want to play. I’m not a thug or a victim. I’m not a nigger. A symphony happens lately when I walk through my neighborhood grocery store parking lot, a percussion of car door locks and syncopated beeps, the remotes sometimes aimed at me like semi-automatic weapons. Maybe they’re playing video games in their heads, I tell myself of these neighbors who’ve recently been sanctioned to so publicly hate. I don’t know how to play this game.

The notion that acting is play appealed to me early on. Onstage I’m not confined to what is, brown skin and frizzy hair, in a world that uses melanin to define personality. Onstage I’ve played a spectrum of humanity, men, women, in between, Indian, Latina, Russian.

When I’m alone with myself I have no color, no body type, no sense of being less or more than anything else. I’m me, a being who appeared on the planet the day I was born, who likes to play at being everything!

I write plays. Screenplays, stage plays, my life’s play, but mostly I like to improvise, to riff off the script I’ve been given to play. Today I’m changing my dialogue from “What the fuck?” to “Let’s play!”