2013 MINNESOTA FRINGE VENUE AND PERFORMANCE DATES ANNOUNCED!
The James Sewell Ballet Tek Box at The Cowles Center
528 Hennepin Avenue, 2nd Floor, Minneapolis MN 55403
We’re back! THE ZEBRA SHIRT OF LONELY CHILDREN has been accepted into the 2013 Minnesota Fringe Festival, Aug. 1-11, and we need your help to bring this show to the Twin Cities! Click on our Indiegogo campaign below to make a donation, and thank you! See you in Minnesota!
Zebra Shirt has much more life ahead!
We are now published on Indie Theater Now, and you can buy the play to read for $1.29. Not too shabby!
We are also hunting for a home for an extended run! If you are an interested producer/investor, please contact us!
We’ll also announce other opportunities to catch the show’s star and staff in all kinds of projects around the city!
Our director Matthew Freeman, of course, has his Zebra Shirt-referenced blog and its one of the best in the business for theatre, playwriting, politics, and the occasional picture of his cat.
Matthew Trumbull will soon have a Tumblr all his own, and the show staff are all crazy Tweeters.
Matthew Trumbull—@TrumbullMatthew
Matthew Freeman—@mfreemanwriter
Kyle Ancowitz—@kyleancowitz
Mark Staufenberg—@Staufenburger
So see you soon, and we’re going to stay in touch!
Join us for our final Fringe Encore performance! Saturday, 8 PM, Soho Playhouse.
It has been a beautiful thing, sharing Zebra Shirt with hundreds of people this summer. I would be honored to have you among the final gathering of lovely people, come to send the play off to whatever hopeful future lies ahead for it. Make it Critical Path this weekend. See you soon:)
ONLY 3 Performances Left!
Sun 9/23 5 PM, Wednesday 9/26 8 PM, Saturday 9/29 8 PM!
Our latest review, and its a charmer:) 3 more shows left! Sun 9/23 @ 5, Wed 9/25 @ 8, and Sat 9/29 @ 8. Buy your tickets here!
We’re at the Soho Playhouse again this Sunday, 3 PM! Get your tickets here
Not exactly sure when this picture was taken. ’83 or ‘84. We’re building my first desk. Well…he’s building my first desk, I’m making it red with artistic ambition. And paint.
The following isn’t a “public” review. It was posted by the N.Y. Theater Buying Guide, which is a membership website for meeting and event planners. They recommend theater in New York City to send clients to when they are in from out-of-town. They made Zebra Shirt in the Fringe Encores their top recommendation, and wrote the following review. It’s a touching write-up, and an honor to be a recommendation for must-impress VIPs who want the best of what this great city offers. Here is the review in its entirety.
THE ZEBRA SHIRT OF LONELY CHILDREN
By Matthew Trumbull
Directed by Matthew Freeman
At the Huron Club in the Soho Playhouse
15 Vandam Street
Through Sat., 9/29.
Review by Ronald Gross
New York Theater Buying Guide
IN BRIEF: Our top recommendation! A one-hour monologue
about the death of the writer-actor’s father, which is by turns
laugh-out-loud funny, harrowingly realistic, and emotionally
riveting. Winner of the Award for Overall Excellence in Solo
Performance at the New York International Fringe Festival.
How do we properly pay our respects to our father when he dies?
That question, which each of us has faced or will face, throbs at the
heart of Matthew Trumbull’s one-man show.
The author/actor found that he could not compose a eulogy for his
dad when he died a decade ago. Now, in this solo performance
piece, he pulls it off with quiet triumph. I can’t recollect a more
eloquent theatrical testament to a patriarch – and certainly none
that so winningly combines pathos, empathy, truthfulness, humor
and insight.
Trumbull’s father was a Minnesota structural engineer – which he
emphatically differentiated from being an architect when he tells
his son: “Architects design what looks nice for a lot of money.
Structural engineers design what would still be standing after an
earthquake.” The old man had all of the virtues of rock-bed mid-
Westerners: fidelity, integrity, grit.
In contrast, his son chooses professional acting as his profession,
New York as his home, and eschews having a house, a car, and,
apparently, a spouse and kids. “My dad made it all look so easy.
I have never made it look easy. I did not inherit this skill. I have
made it look chaotic, hilarious, passionate, financially impossible,
and utterly dependent on luck.”
The father’s life was fulfilled by the steady application of down-
to-earth tenets in a time and place where that could assure success.
“I understood that it couldn’t have been easy for a steady riser like
him to watch me grope my way through the murk of the acting
business.”
Yet this father and son not only love each other, but respect the
fact that each has found an important value in doing the work they
love. This is a rare family portrait devoid of corrosive resentment,
bitterness, and rage.
Trumbull builds his spider-web of anecdotes out of vignettes
that are chiseled with exacting words and tightly-controlled
delivery. From the opening image of a couple of trench-coated
medical students coming to take possession of his father’s corpse,
which has been donated for educational and research purposes,
to a closing soliloquy with a suddenly significant coffee-mug,
Trumbull populates the stage with people and things that spring to
life from his evocative words.
Called “beautifully written” by Theatermania, and given Four
Stars from Time Out NY, THE ZEBRA SHIRT OF LONELY
CHILDREN dares to explores forbidden topics, such as the use of
morphine at the end of life, and donating one’s cadaver to science.
But in doing so, it reveals these extreme choices as spiritual
strategies for maintaining autonomy in the face of crushing
calamity.
In Trumbull’s gentle, powerful, steady hands, the agonies of saying
farewell to a parent are enacted with compassion, understanding,
and reverence. This son’s father could not have hoped for a more
honorable tribute, after all.
Tech was fantastic at the Soho Playhouse. The show works even better in the new space than it did in our former black box home. More intimate, better sound, I’ll actually be able to see the audience, AND—the bar is in the space! Everybody wins! See you Saturday at 8!
Click on the icon for tix!!
The Zebra Shirt of Lonely Children is a Fringe Encore Series Selection!
We’re incredibly thrilled that our award-winning production has been granted this honor.
5 more performances have been granted to us at the Huron Club in the historic Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street, NY, NY 10013.
Sat 9/8 @ 8pm
Sun 9/16 @ 3pm
Sun 9/23 @ 5pm
Wed 9/26 @ 8pm
Sat 9/29 @ 8pm
Join us! Click here for tickets!
We are pleased to announce that The Zebra Shirt of Lonely Children will be available for purchase on Indie Theatre Now in their Best of FringeNYC 2012 Collection!
Indie Theater Now is a project of the nonprofit corporation, The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. (NYTE). It is a dynamic, constantly expanding digital library of plays by indie playwrights whose work meets the criteria of our publication program. (Learn about our curating process here.) For a very small price, plays may be purchased for reading only (i.e., plays may not be printed nor copied to reader’s computer). Revenue is shared with the participating playwrights.
We are just as proud of the writing in this play as we are of the production itself, and are pleased to showcase it via this low-cost, easy-to-use medium.
