Martin Moran as Thornton Wilder in O, Earth. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.
So excited O, Earth was nominated for Best Play! Read the full announcement here.
Interview in The Brooklyn Rail about O, Earth /
I talked to playwright Susan Soon He Stanton for an interview in The Brooklyn Rail. It was a great conversation!
"Rail: Something that strikes me in your writing and in your performance art is your relationship with theatricality and intimacy.
Llewellyn: I think those are the things I care about. Maybe they are one thing. Theater is intimacy. I’m obsessed with the audience. I’m obsessed with being in a room together, and being in a group in a room together with whatever a play or a theater experience is—or a work of art that is physicalized. It’s connected to everything to me. This art is something that can only be experienced when we breathe all the same air in the same room. The relationship with the audience is what makes theatricality. If you are in an audience, you want something to happen to you. I don’t want to watch someone else’s story. I’m obsessed with where the audience is in the story and what their experience is. I don’t just want to tell a story and have other people witness it. I’m trying to create work that will allow people go through an experience together."
Read the full interview here.
O, Earth is a Time Out New York Critic's Pick! /
"One of the loveliest things—in an absolute avalanche of lovely things—about Casey Llewellyn's wide-ranging piece is her title. In calling it O, Earth, Llewellyn quotes from the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, when Emily's overwhelmed spirit exclaims, “Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” This is not so surprising; Llewellyn's postmodern pop-threnody takes Wilder's masterpiece as its matter and prime mover. But the playwright also reflects the fragment through a prism. Written in just that dropped-h way, Llewellyn's title also harkens to Jeremiah (“O, earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord”); say the phrase, you hear the echoes. Llewellyn hides an encompassing lamentation in the words that even Wilder, past master of heartbreak, didn't amplify.
Is that a lot to pin on a title? Not if you see the play itself, which is confident, lyrical, hilarious, unabashedly literate and unapologetically political. It also holds the Wilder text as gently as a robin's egg." --Helen Shaw
Wow! Thanks Helen Shaw for this amazing review! Read the whole thing here. And get your tickets before they're gone!
Interview with Adam Szymkowicz on for his "I Interview Playwrights" blog /
Check out the interview here! Excerpt about O, Earth below:
"Q: Tell me about O, Earth.
A: O, Earth is an exploration of what we're doing here living on earth. It started with reckoning with the theatrical and cultural inheritance of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and takes up many of his themes and concerns while incorporating my own. The characters in the play are concerned with happiness, justice, themselves, each other, their and others' place in the world. I am concerned in the play with the being here-ness and being here together-ness of theater and life (the play will also be at HERE!), so in the play very strange combination of iconic characters reckon with this (ghosts and living people, characters and real people). Part of what I'm interested in is how specificity and universality are represented in theater, and the real consequences of representation and visibility. We each experience life from a singular perspective, so O, Earth is a bunch of very different characters’ engagement with the universal experiences we all share: everyday life, love, and death. Something else specific that I am grappling with in the play is this current moment in gay/queer/trans politics and history in which some of us (white, cisgendered, middle class or rich gay or queer people) have been invited to join the mainstream in the form of unprecedented access to privilege (cultural acceptance, marriage, jobs, visibility, etc.), while issues that affect members of the queer/trans/gay community with less privilege disproportionately have been deprioritized in gay politics (trans and gender non-conforming peoples’ rights, racial justice, de-criminalization of sex work, housing for youth, police profiling, etc.). Even though the most marginalized members of our community are responsible for much of the resistance that has allowed us to get here. Vastly different experiences, access, and choices in the “community” have changed our sense of “our” since people fought together under the banner of gay rights in the last century. So I am thinking about that too. And it’s funny."
Tickets on Sale Now for O, Earth! $15 in 2015! /
Get your tickets now for O, EARTH!
Performances January 23rd-February 20th, 2016
O, Earth
By Casey Llewellyn
Directed by Dustin Wills
With:
Moe Angelos, Jess Barbagallo, Ato Blankson-Wood, Emily Davis, Cecilia Gentili, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Tommy Heleringer, Mizz June, Martin Moran, and Kristen Sieh.
Portia DeRossi stares into the soft light of her refrigerator and wonders if she’ll ever be truly happy; Our Town’s Emily and George venture into the unknown; Thornton Wilder digs in search of a time capsule he buried under the stage long ago; Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are jettisoned from the world of the dead, curious to discover what’s happened in the world they left..
O, Earth floods the stage with a panorama of characters from gay popular culture, theatre history, and radical New York City, to ask how we live as ourselves and in communion with others. An interrogation of the "universal," Casey Llewellyn's epic play imagines the boundless possibilities within everyone, every day.
2015 Ticket Discount is $15, if you buy them in 2015, for the first 15 performances!
Use code: 15for15
O, Earth Cast Announced! /
We're cast! OMG! These people are SO beautiful.
Cast of O, Earth from left to right: Moe Angelos (Ellen Degeneres), Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Stage Manager), Martin Moran (Thornton Wilder), Kristen Sieh (Emily), Tommy Heleringer (Duncan), Jess Barbagallo (George), Emily Davis (Portia De Rossi), Cecilia Gentili (Sylvia Rivera), and Mizz June (Marsha P. Johnson). And Ato Blankson-Wood was out of town when this picture was taken, but he's playing Spencer.
I'm so in love with these amazing artists!
The Creative Team and Crew are also amazing! Dustin Wills is directing, Kate Attwell and The Foundry Theatre are everything, Adam Rigg is designing the set, Montana Blanco is designing the costumes, Barbara Samuels is designing the lights, Raphael Mishler is designing the props and Janie Bullard is designing the sound! Amanda Feldman is the Line Producer, Jeff Drucker is the Production Manager, Nicole Marconi is the Production Stage Manager and Andrea Berkey is the Assistant Stage Manager!
O, Earth Production Dates Announced! /
O, Earth, the play I'm writing for The Foundry Theatre, will run January 23rd-February 20th at HERE. Here is a quote from the production announcement on Broadway World:
A contemporary epic, O, Earth brings a panorama of characters to the stage: Our Town's Emily, George, Simon Stimson, the Stage Manager and Wilder himself join historical LGBTQ icons Gertrude Stein, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as well as Ellen DeGeneres and Portia DeRossi. In this play's ever expanding universe, Llewellyn invites the audience to consider the ways we organize our togetherness.
Read the rest of the announcement here.
Summer Nights on Jupiter, Saturday, September 26th /
Next Saturday at 8pm, I'm reading along with many other great readers, musicians, and performers in the beautiful garden, Le Petit Versailles, in my favorite summer reading series curated by Stephen Boyer, Summer Nights on Jupiter. It's free! Here's the link to the fbook event page.
Other artists performing (get excited!):
Jacqueline Mary, Gio BlackPeter, Che Gossett, Phoebe Glick, Sade Martha Mary Murphy, Jasmine Gibson, Kembra Pfahler and possibly more T.B.A.
Saturday, September 26th, 2015
8pm
346 East Houston St @ Ave C, New York, New York 10009