hey all.

my solo play, Lydia’s Funeral Video, was accepted into the New York International Fringe Festival, and there will be five performances of the full play at an undisclosed location in NYC between August 8 and 24, 2008. !aiya! how exciting.

for those of you who don’t know, i was born and raised in NYC, although i’ve banished myself to the west coast these last seven years, so this Fringe festival represents something of a homecoming to me.

and one of the very best parts of all this is that filmmaker and director, and dear friend from high school, Thomas Connors, has agreed to apply his considerable skill & talent to directing this show. both Tom and i are honored to have recently had Daniel Simon join the Lydia Fringe crew as technical director and the Authorized Company Representative (ACR), which sounds like, and actually is, a mysterious position of Awesome Significance.

anyway, we will hereby be blogging about the development of this production. Tom will be starting it off – here is his first post about the show (dated June 24, 2008; i was late in my response. feel free to send me hate mail).

Blog 1: from director Thomas Connors (June 24, 2008)

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately: talking. Lots of it. After all, this is a different production from the Bay Area show and so Sam and I have been carefully going through every aspect of the show and parsing what we want to keep from that production and what we’d like to try differently. And we’re finding quite a bit of both. The first run went over like gangbusters but we’ve also done some paring down and as we muddle through our first conversations about the play we’re both discussing things about the production we might like to change. Rehearsals don’t officially start until July 1 and the really meaty, on-our-feet work begins then – right now, it’s more picking at it, arguing anything that needs to be argued, and making sure we agree on the fundamental direction. So far it’s going great.Also, we’re doing marketing. Lots and lots of marketing. This is the part of the show where we go out and drum up business so both Sam and I and our awesome new tech director Dan Simon are throwing ourselves into getting the word out to as many places as possible. It helps a lot that we have one very well received run under our belt that we can refer to, as this lets people know that the show’s already been through the ringer once and came out fine…

Back to work. We’re going to try to make a pretty comprehensive survey of this whole Fringe process, so check back in soon.

– here concludes Tom’s post–

and, for your viewing pleasure, here’s the advertisement image we submitted for inclusion in the official FringeNYC program guide: