This Sunday at 4pm at Bar 82 Coffee Black Productions will present their first annual No-Doze festival titled “Style and Sin.” The festival will feature seven short plays, each with a different writing style and based on one of the seven deadly sins. For Co-Founders Carrie Boehm (Co-Founder and Resident Playwright) and Michael Bloom (Co-Founder and Artistic Director) it is an experiment in spontaneity; and given the nature of the project that’s all it really can be, but more on that later.
Coffee Black Productions was founded in the summer of 2009 after a year of Bloom and Boehm considering the possibility of starting a company together. Carrie Boehm explains: “About two years ago we started toying with the idea of starting a theatre company but weren’t exactly sure what the company should be. I had a play I'd started developing in college that I was having trouble finishing and in July 2009 Mike stopped into a coffee shop in his neighborhood and asked if he could do a reading there. When they gave him the okay, he told me I had a month to finish my play, and that's pretty much how the company started!” That first reading was pulled together by the pair in September of 2009 and marked the company’s first production, but not its last. “The coffee shop asked us to come back so we started planning monthly readings, incorporating more playwrights and actors.” Since readings in a coffee shop were the company’s first foray into producing work the name is hardly a surprise, but Boehm explains that it means a little bit more: “The name Coffee Black Productions came from Mike in a fit of naming and it was the only name that actually fit what we wanted to do, focus on the playwright’s work, without sounding pretentious.” The company, whose mission statement is “To perform plays simply, focusing on the playwright’s intentions without directorial embellishments that distort the playwright’s work,” has been doing just that ever since. Just about a year after that first production in Bloom’s neighborhood coffee shop, Coffee Black announced their next big move as a company, naming a Resident Director in collaborator Bobbi Masters.
As for this Sunday’s performance, Boehm explains that the seed of the project grew out of some of their past work, “As for the No-Doze festival, it's sort of an outgrowth of our ‘Abduction of Persephone’ series we did in May. At least, that’s when the idea came about. But it is also an outgrowth of our monologue nights. We have had a lot of success getting multiple playwrights and actors together to perform various pieces in one night and it’s just fun to have so many people involved. It’s not just a small group on stage that has all become comfortable with each other. On the monologue nights, everyone is on their own and even. It’s energizing.”
The idea that came out was to put up a festival soup to nuts in one long weekend, but by their own admission it will be manic! Later today, Thursday the 22nd, the chosen playwrights will meet with Boehm and Bloom to pull their style, sin and casting requirements out of a hat, and from there they go home and will have until Friday afternoon to finish their play. On Friday the directors and CBP will meet up and the directors pull their finished play and cast out of that very same hat; from there they go home, read the play and make a game plan (full disclosure: I will be directing one of the plays and have no idea what to expect either!) Saturday directors and actors meet for one afternoon and evening of rehearsal before everyone meets together at the theatre on Sunday for a quick run through before show time at 4pm. Whew! Boehm explains the idea further: “Mike wanted to challenge one of the playwrights we've worked with a few times who always incorporates many characters into his plays. We wanted to give him casting boundaries and after brainstorming on how to do it, the idea to have a set number of playwrights each write about a specific theme & in a specific style came out.” And that was the start of the No-Doze festival! As for that first playwright? “Ironically, that playwright is out of town this weekend!” No doubt it this weekend will be highly caffeinated, manic and very spontaneous for everyone, but that’s just what Boehm is interested in about it.” The spontaneity makes it different because nobody from playwright to the audience to us knows what anything is going to be before it's done. There's no room for preparation on anybody's end. We have no idea what's going to happen, which is part of what makes it so exciting.”
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Coffee Black Productions will present it’s First Annual No-Doze Festival “Style and Sin” for one performance on Sunday July 25th at 4pm at Bar 82 (136 2nd Ave. NYC)
Plays by:
Erin Austin
Butch D’Ambrosio
Gabrielle Fox
Angela Gant
Jean Hart
Ashley Kuske
Mike Poblete
Directed by:
Hannah Friedman
Margaret Hall
Bobbi Masters
Lauren Reinhard†
Sarah Simmons
Korrie Strodel
J.J. von Mehren
†member SDC
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