NM Actors Lab News:
SANTA FE — Emily Rankin, Artistic Director of the New Mexico Actors Lab, has announced the Fall Season of three engaging and compelling plays by award-winning playwrights: Cowboy Mouth by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith (Sept. 11-28), Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive (Oct. 16-Nov. 2), and The Half Life of Marie Curie by Lauren Gunderson (Nov. 20-Dec. 7).
Tickets are now on sale at the NMAL website, www.nmactorslab.com. Fall Season Flex Passes are $96 (a 20% discount off three regular admissions). Individual tickets are $40, with discounted tickets (see website for details) and preview performances costing $20.
Cowboy Mouth, by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith, is an urban fable about a woman who kidnaps a young man at gunpoint, taking him hostage from his wife and child to make him a pop prophet, ”like a rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth.” Zoe Lesser will direct this exhilarating and poetic play that serves as a cautionary tale about using art as deliverance from our flaws and relating to someone’s potential instead of who they are.
Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive is a wildly funny, surprising, and devastating tale of survival as seen through the lens of a troubling relationship between a young girl and an older man. Village Voice described it as “…a tremendous achievement, genuine and genuinely disturbing…This is, quite simply, the sweetest and most forgiving play ever written about child abuse…Vogel’s delicate tactic makes sense not only as a way to redouble the dramatic effect, but as a representation of reality, a perfect case of the form fitting the subject.” Emily Rankin will direct.
In 1911, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. By 1912, she was the object of ruthless gossip over an alleged affair, all but erasing her achievements from public memory. Weakened and demoralized by the press, Marie joins her friend and colleague Hertha Ayrton, an electromechanical engineer and suffragette, to recover from the scandal at Hertha’s seaside retreat on the British coast. The Half-life of Marie Curie, to be directed by NMAL founder Robert Benedetti, revels in the power of female friendship as it explores the relationship between these two brilliant women.
Performance Details:
- Cowboy Mouth: Sept. 11-14, 18-21, and 25-28
- How I Learned To Drive: Oct. 16-19, 23-26, and Oct. 30-Nov. 2
- The Half Life of Marie Curie: Nov. 20-23, 28-30, and Dec. 4-7
Performances at 7:30 p.m., Thursday through Saturday evenings, matinees at 2 p.m., Sunday, with the first Thursday a limited seating preview at 7:30 p.m. All performances at The Lab Theater, 1213 Parkway, Santa Fe (one block from Meow Wolf).
Contacts:
- Additional information at www.nmactorslab.com
Artistic Director, Emily Rankin, emily@nmactorslab.com
Managing Director, Kita Mehaffy, kita@nmactorslab.com