Dixon Place hosts The Launch Event of a New Play Anthology Plays and Playwrights 2010 April 19, 2010

On Monday, April 19th, from 4:30 – 8:30pm, Dixon Place will host the launch event of The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. (NYTE) publication of Plays and Playwrights 2010. This is the eleventh volume in NYTE’s annual series of anthologies of new plays by never-before-published playwrights. Performances will be held at 5:30pm and 7:30pm, featuring excerpts from the new plays with playwrights on hand for book signings throughout the event.

ABOUT THE PUBLICATION
Plays and Playwrights 2010 features ten works that premiered off-off-Broadway between September 2008-September 2009: The Invitation by Brian Parks; Flip Side by Ellen Maddow; Any Day Now by Nat Cassidy; The Spin Cycle by Jerrod Bogard; Suspicious Package: Rx by Gyda Arber & Aaron Baker; Our Country by Tony Asaro & Dan Collins; Maddy: A Modern Day Medea by Will Le Vasseur; Al’s Business Cards by Josh Koenigsberg; The Songs of Robert by John Crutchfield; and MilkMilkLemonade by Joshua Conkel. These plays were originally presented by some of New York’s most respected indie theaters, including the Ohio Theater, The Talking Band, Manhattan Theatre Source, the Brick Theater, Horse Trade Theatre Group, and the New York International Fringe Festival.

The book is edited by Martin Denton. In addition to the complete texts of the plays, it includes biographical information about the playwrights, production data, and an introductory essay by Denton. The foreword is by playwright Leslie Bramm.

Martin Denton is the editor of ten previous Plays and Playwrights anthologies as well as Playing with Canons: Explosive New Works from Classic Literature by America’s Indie Playwrights and Unpredictable Plays. He is the founder and executive director of The New York Theatre Experience, Inc., a nonprofit corporation that uses new and traditional media to provide advocacy and support for American theatre. He is the founder and editor of nytheatre.com and founding producer of nytheatrecast, the first regularly scheduled original podcast devoted to New York theatre. Denton received an OTTY (“Our Town Thanks You”) Award in 2008 for service to the community, and NYTE received the 2008 New York Innovative Theatre Foundation’s Stewardship Award.

ABOUT DIXON PLACE
Dixon Place is a non-profit organization founded in 1986 to provide a space for literary and performing artists to create and develop new works in front of a live audience. While other venues of its kind have since died off, or now only present established artists, Dixon Place remains at the heart of the New York experimental performance scene. Taking risks is crucial to the life of Dixon Place, its artists and audiences. The new Dixon Place opened in 2009.

For these artists, the only way to experiment and test ideas, is to perform them before an audience: to feel the reaction of a live group of people, without the pressures of production costs and premature press exposure. Dixon Place has grown out of a direct need for more support of the artistic process. In spite of the growing visibility of performance art, it is still difficult for emerging artists to find venues in which to test new ideas and performance techniques. The financial and professional risks for producers or presenters are too high. Dixon Place, therefore, provides an organization that facilitates these artistic experiments.