Theater News

Planet Connections Theatre Festivity Announces Lineup

Planet Connections Theatre Festivity has announced its 2012 lineup. New York’s premiere ecofriendly/socially-conscious theatre festival will take place from May 30 through June 24 at 45 Bleecker Street.

During the Festivity, each show partners with a charity and some of the ways they offer support are soliciting donations at shows, holding special benefit performances, fundraisers and/or talkbacks after performances with representatives from the charity. This summer, the festivity will feature nearly 50 productions including comedies, dramas, musicals, docu-theater, solo pieces, one-acts, and developmental/staged readings.

Among the featured talents and productions in this summer’s festivity are three-time Tony award-winner Hinton Battle, who is overseeing the musical arrangements for What We Do for Love, a musical revue about relationships; the docu-theater drama Trafficked, which tells the story of sex slavery and child exploitation through the eyes of 15 young women across the globe; experimental dance theater piece 4 Sustenance, which examines the complexity of our relationships with the planet and with each other through multiple stories and a fusion of music, movement and spoken text; and Stephan Davis’ new musical, A Dance for Rylie, a gay lovestory which focuses on the declining health of Rylie and the hospital policy that keeps his partner away.

Other highlights include Duncan Pflaster’s Ancient Greece-set erotic comedy Empress of Sex; the Jewish ghost story Bubby’s Shadow; a musical adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo; the docu-theater comedy The Bad Date Project; Twelfth Night: Wall Street; Pageant Princess, the Musical which is inspired by the TLC show Toddlers & Tiaras; and The American Play, which focuses on two male college students who are damagingly inspired by the work of author Brett Easton Ellis.

Some of the charities this year’s productions have partnered with include Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Jewish Social Services Hospice, American Red Cross of Greater New York, Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, the Rainforest Alliance, The Children’s Aid Society, UJA of New York, Safe Horizon, and the Wildlife Federation.

For more information and the full festival lineup, click here.

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