This Is My Office

Andy Bragen's This Is My Office
The Play Company

NOVEMBER 5—DECEMBER 8, 2013

chashama 210 Art Space
210 East 43rd Street
New York, NY

Performances:
7:30 PM
November 5–11, 13–18, 20–26, 29–30
December 1–2, 4–8

Press Previews: Saturday, November 9 and Sunday, November 10 at 7:30pm
Official Opening: Monday, November 11 at 7:30pm.

Tickets: $30-40
playco.org or 866.811.4111

Site-Specific Production Directed by Davis McCallum
Performed by David Barlow
Written by Andy Bragen
Designed by Andrew Boyce (set), Kaye Voyce (costumes), Tyler Micoleau (lighting), and Peter John Still (sound)

The Play Company (PlayCo) will launch their season of new theater with the world premiere of American writer Andy Bragen’s This Is My Office, November 5–December 8. Directed by Davis McCallum (Water by the Spoonful, The Whale), this site-specific, solo performance by David Barlow (The Film Society, The Castle, and, with PlayCo in 2003, Smashing) unravels a unique story that turns out to be very different than the one the narrator begins.

This Is My Office  is a ghost story for the theater, set in a disused office that becomes a character unto itself. One night, hunkered down in the office provided to him by an arts grant, eating his way through a box of donuts and battling intense writer’s block, protagonist Andy Bragen discovers an old photograph that spurs a revelation: the very office he currently inhabits was once that of his father. As Andy delves deeper and deeper into his complicated and conflicted relationship with his recently deceased father, strange things begin to happen to him in the space as family and writing take on a symbiotic relationship. The office bridges the two Bragens’ lives, and ultimately becomes an epic symbol of redemption, faith and love. This Is My Office  received workshop productions at Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep in July 2010, and at Studio Roanoke in April 2011.

About the Artists:

Andy Bragen (Writer) is a New York-born playwright and musician, and a graduate of Brown University’s MFA Program in Literary Arts. His plays include The Hairy Dutchman, commissioned by the University of Rochester and performed in 2009; Spuyten Duyvil, developed at the 2004 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference and produced by Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep. in 2008; Greater Messapia for Queens Theatre in the Park in 2004; and Ranch Home, originally commissioned by Clubbed Thumb and under development with New York based Tiny Dancer Films. Also a translator, Bragen’s adaption of Vengeance Can Wait was workshopped at the 2006 Playlabs Conferences in Minneapolis, produced at PS122 ib 2008, and recently published by Samuel French.

Davis McCallum’s (Director) directorial credits include Quiara Hudes’ Water By The Spoonful (Second Stage, 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Sam Hunter’s The Whale (Playwrights Horizons; 2013 Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play); Gabe Kahane and Seth Bockley’s February House (Public Theater); Sarah Ruhl and Todd Almond’s Melancholy Play (13P); Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One (Pearl Theater Company); Michael Mitnick’s Sex Lives of Our Parents (Second Stage); Hunter’s A Bright New Boise (Partial Comfort; Drama Desk Nomination) and Five Gencoides (Clubbed Thumb); Greg Moss’s punkplay (Clubbed Thumb); Chuck Mee’s Queens Boulevard (Signature Theater), Quiara Hudes’ Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue (P73; Pulitzer Prize Finalist); Henry V (New Victory); and Jane Eyre, The Tempest, The Turn Of The Screw (The Acting Company). He has also directed shows at the Guthrie, the Old Globe, Humana, Hartford Stage, Long Wharf, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Williamstown, Alliance, Chautauqua, the O’Neill, Playmakers Rep, Two River, New York Stage & Film, others. McCallum is a Drama League Alum, a past participant of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program, the recipient of a Boris Sagal Fellowship, and a Princess Grace Honoree.

David Barlow (Performer) is an American actor who received his MFA in Acting from NYU. He last performed for The Play Company in Brooke Berman's Smashing. Barlow has also performed in The Film Society (Keen Company); The Castle, Serious Money, Victory, Scenes From An Execution (PTPNYC); Horizon (New York Theater Workshop); Oroonoko, Andorra, Saved (Theater For A New Audience); Romola And Nijinski (Primary Stages); Perfect Harmony (Theater Row); Mycenaean (BAM); and The Seagull (Roundtable Ensemble). His regional credits include Pericles (Berkeley Rep); Venus In Fur (Portland Center Stage); Oleanna (Bristol Riverside Theater); The Tempest, The Crucible (Hartford Stage); The Hour Of Feeling (Actors Theater of Louisville); King Lear (Kansas City Rep); This Is Our Youth (Philadelphia Theater Co); and On The Jump (Arena Stage). Internationally, David has performed at the Festival d'Avignon, BITEF in Belgrade, Theater Garonne in Toulouse, and in David Levine's Bauerntheater in Germany.

About The Play Company (PlayCo):

The Play Company is an OBIE Award-winning Off Broadway theater production company. Now in its fourteenth season, PlayCo has produced 22 new plays from the United States, Germany, Romania, Poland, Sweden, Japan, India, Mexico, France, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England. PlayCo develops and produces adventurous new plays from the U.S. and around the world, advancing a dynamic global view of contemporary theater and expanding the American theater repertoire.

As the only New York company regularly producing outstanding contemporary plays from around the world alongside new American work, PlayCo’s distinctive international programming links American theatre with world theater, American artists with the global creative community, and American audiences with a whole world of plays.

For more information, please contact Patrick Leonard or Blake Zidell at
Blake Zidell & Associates, 718.643.9052, patrick@blakezidell.com or blake@blakezidell.com.