9/5: Playwrights' Platform: Program 2

Photos courtesy of the artists

Saturday, September 5
3:00 PM
$25 General Admission, $15 Student Admission
Black Box Theater (indoors)

Playwrights’ Platform is a newly created live anthology, responsive to the needs of boundary-bending playwrights and focused on the stories central to their writing. Audiences are invited into the hearts and minds of these award-winning theater artists to explore each turn of phrase and unique worldview.

Sylvan Oswald builds worlds of language that are alternately messy and meticulous, obsessive and sparse, heady and embodied. Here, he shares material from I Leave Saint Cloud, a prismatic montage anchored by a Jean Cocteau-like figure, an Icarus plummeting through his own life, addicted to art-making, opium and beautiful young men.

Actor and poet Jim Fletcher, composer and cellist Lori Goldston, and composer and sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson collage the sonic and visual worlds of 20th- and 21st-century film filtered through the densely emotional and psychically charged resonance of early Yiddish Theatre. Pulling from the texts of Ben Hecht, Sholem Asch, Bertolt Brecht, and Isaac Babel, among others, they pose questions about freedom, connection, resistance, violence, dizzying shifts in the understanding of humanness, and cultural inheritance.

Theater/dance/performance artists & makers Lucy Sexton (one half of DANCENOISE) and Adrienne Truscott (one half of Wau Wau Sisters) tell a gritty, glamourous, 1970s-East Village-punk rock-feminist fairytale set to the music of Blondie, in Blonde as Hell.

About the Playwrights and Collaborators:

Sylvan Oswald creates plays, texts, publications, and video. Recent projects include the theatrical essay Trainers (Oberon Books, Gate Theatre, London) and the performance text High Winds (Fusebox, TBA). His plays include A Kind of Weather (Diversionary Theatre, San Diego), Sun Ra (Joe’s Pub, Soho Rep Writer-Director Lab), Pony (Northwestern University Press, About Face Theater, Chicago), and Vendetta Chrome (Clubbed Thumb). Other writings include “Towards a Trans Theater,” (Methuen Drama Handbook on Gender and Theater), “My Butch Musical” (Little Joe), and “Cut Piece” on play formatting (3-Hole Press). Oswald is a Guggenheim Fellow and an alum of New Dramatists. He is head of playwriting at UCLA and he is currently at work on an eco-feminist sci-fi musical with composer/lyricist Tova Katz.

Described as “a stalwart of the New York avant-garde scene” by the New York Times, Jim Fletcher is a performer and a founding member of New York City Players theater company with Richard Maxwell, his working partner for more than 20 years. He is part of Elevator Repair Service’s internationally renowned production of Gatz, winning an Obie Award for his performance work in a staging of the full text of the novel The Great Gatsby. He created the monologue Sight Is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First with Tim Etchells, is currently performing and making shows with The Wooster Group, and can be seen in Jordan Strafer’s film installation DISSONANCE at the 2026 Whitney Biennial.

Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer, and teacher from Seattle. Her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time, and geography. Collaborators and/or bosses include Earth, Nirvana, Mirah, Jessika Kenney, Ilan Volkov, Eyvind Kang, Stuart Dempster, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Jherek Bischoff, Malcom Goldstein, Steve Von Till, Lonnie Holley, Cat Power, Christian Rizzo and Sophie Laly, Lynn Shelton, and many more. Her work has been commissioned by and/or performed at the Kennedy Center, Sydney Festival, Cineteca Nacional de México, Tectonics Festival, Frye Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival, WNYC, Paris Fashion Week, On the Boards, Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Jewish Film Festival, Joe’s Pub, the Stone, University of Chicago, and venues large and small throughout North America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe.

Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree interdisciplinary artist, director, and composer. Her practice explores listening as a way of knowing and relating, which is shaped by Indigenous resonance, spatial perception, and embodied vulnerability. Working with psychoacoustic tones, algorithmic systems, and sculptural spatialization as materials, she composes spaces that shift awareness, inviting deep relational encounters between bodies, technologies, and the land. Thompson’s work has been presented by CTM Berlin, MUTEK, Onassis Foundation, ImagineNative, Pioneer Works, PICA, PSNY, among others. A current Onassis ONX Studio member, she has been in residence at Pioneer Works, MIT OpenDoc Lab with the Indigenous Screen Office of Canada, and HERVISIONS x Arebyte (UK). She was a founding member of the Working Consortium in developing First Nations Performing Arts.

Lucy Sexton has worked as a choreographer, director, dramaturg, film producer, and arts advocate. She and Anne Iobst created and continue to perform as DANCENOISE. Started in the 1980s East Village club scene, they went on to perform at Lincoln Center, win a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award, tour internationally, and open the new Whitney Museum in 2015. She developed and directed Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell, with Kathleen Russo, and produced the documentaries The Legend of Leigh Bowery, directed by Charles Atlas, and TURNING, a concert film by Charles Atlas and Anohni, featuring Anohni and the Johnsons. Most recently, she developed and directed singer/songwriter Eszter Balint’s I Hate Memory at Joe’s Pub. Sexton currently leads New Yorkers for Culture and Arts, a cultural advocacy coalition working to strengthen the creative sector in every community.

Adrienne Truscott is a choreographer, circus acrobat, dancer, writer, storyteller, actor, and comedian. Her work crosses lines and methodologies from dance, theater, comedy, and performance art, presented as short drag club acts or evening-length pieces, dances, one-lady plays, group pieces, and solos. She received an inaugural 2014 Doris Duke Impact Artist Award and a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant for Theater/Performance Art. Her solo comedic work, collaborations, and group choreographic works have been presented at Sydney Opera House, Just For Laughs, Darwin Festival, PS122, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, Edinburgh Fringe, among others. The Wau Wau Sisters, her collaboration with Tanya Gagne, won the 2009 Herald Angel Award and influenced experimental circus and cabaret. Her show Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else! won the 2013 Edinburgh Foster's Panel-Prize. Truscott can be seen around Tivoli and is the resident host of Bard College’s Spiegeltent.

About Tickets

• One performance ticket is $25. ($15. for students). Performance tickets do no include evening concerts.

• Ticket Combo Packages:
  -       A two-performance ticket bundle is $40. ($25. for students)
  -       A three-performance ticket bundle is $50. ($30. for students) *only available 8/29*
  -       Add an evening concert ticket to your bundle and receive a $10 discount. This all-day pass maximizes discounts!

• Individual evening concert tickets bought before August 1 receive a $10 discount. Use code EARLYBIRD10 by July 31.