May 24 & 25, 2013

For centuries man has created preconceived notions of doom and gloom, post-apocalyptic nightmares of earthquakes, tsunamis, mountains falling into the sea and deserts bombarded by sudden blizzards. While these images make for fantastic action flicks, its does little for creating art that connects the audience to a greater understanding of what it means to transition. This proposed work will focus on examining this transition through the intersection of the multiple meanings given to the number seven; the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Virtues, the Seven Chakras, the Seven Healing Tones, the Seven Colors of the Spectrum of Light, the Seven Sciences, and even the symbolic Seven Seals. 2012 has come and gone and Planet EARTH still remains, that much is certain, what is unclear is what will be the role of humanity once this smoke clears.

It began with that moment. Seven students and three teachers came together to create a youth ensemble. Ten years and over 300 students later, Youth Creates is still generating ripples that are felt around the world.

This year’s production, Are You Going to Answer That? follows the wide-reaching effects of a single phone call on one person and all those he encounters.

It begins with that moment….

How does one become a Producer of ground-breaking theatre at 7 Stages?
Unlike commercial producers who receive a financial return on their investment, being a Producer for 7 Stages means contributing to our nonprofit theater and supporting our artistic endeavors. Your contribution is tax-deductible, and your return on investment comes from knowing you helped create a lasting piece of art that adds to Atlanta’s cultural life. Simply make a tax-deductible contribution of $500 or more to any of our shows this season, and become part of the artistic process.

Associate Producer                                                                                                                           $500

• Mention in our e-newsletter reaching over 10,000 patrons
• A Complimentary beverage at Java Lords
• An invitation to a technical & dress rehearsal
• Producer mention in the program
• Meet & Greet with the artists
• 2 tickets to Opening Night

Executive Producer                                                                                                                          $1,000

• The Above Plus
• A backstage tour of the facility led by a member of 7 Stages’ artistic staff
• A season long parking pass for the 7 Stages parking lot.
• Producer credit on all printed material
• 2 additional Tickets to Opening Night (a total of 4 tickets)

This is Howard’s first directorial project as new leader of the Little Five Points theatre. Lady Lay takes a joy ride through life’s rules and regulations. MariAnne has worked at a West Berlin Employment office all her life. When she hears Bob Dylan on the radio her world is forever changed and the wall comes tumbling down. Although she can hardly understand the words of this inspirational new music, MariAnne begins a personal revolution. Through the inspiration of music and a relationship with an artist, she discovers her heart breaking through the walls of limitation.

Howard too is realizing a personal revolution as she goes through this transition of leadership. She finds this production offers lessons in identity, and Hamilton in turn is her muse, her Bob Dylan.  His lyrics, “Why wait any longer for the world to begin?” echoes Hamilton’s sentiment. ”It’s time for Heidi to take her place as artistic director and define herself as a leader in our community.”  Lady Lay is a love story — a love of language, a love of freedom, a love of art and expression. This production is Howard’s love story to Hamilton.

Howard has set the bar high with this production. She started by hiring an exceptional cast including 7 Stages founders Del Hamilton, playing Bob Dylan, and Faye Allen, as part of the ensemble of players.  Atlanta actress Stacy Melich (My Left Breast), returns to 7 Stages in a big way by tackling the role of MariAnne. Hometown girl turned Second City actress Tara Ochs, last seen at 7 Stages in Mr. Universe, will play a multitude of characters with the ensemble, as well as the guitar. Also a part of the ensemble is Bajo Sanubi, who is making his 7 Stages debut. Howard called on musician and actor Jed Drummond, most recently seen onstage as Arthur in Dracula: The Rock Opera, to be the leader of the ensemble. Howard and Drummond are collaborating to create a musical atmosphere that incorporates samples of Bob Dylan’s songs. Lady Lay is not a Dylan retrospective, but his music and lyrics are sprinkled throughout the show.

The set design for the show requires objects to fall from the sky while breaking down the walls of reality. This in and of itself is a challenge in any space. In 7 Stages’ Black Box it requires a more than apt designer. After seeing the work Nadia Morgan did for Angry Fags, Howard knew she had found the right woman for the job. “I am reeling with the power of this cast and production team creating a world together to force our shift in transition and break down the walls that limit possibility. Like Dylan says in the show ‘Don’t look back.’ ”

Playwright, Lydia Stryk

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Angry Fags by Topher Payne – World Premiere
a comedy with a body count
Directed by Justin Anderson
February 21- March 17 2013|
Show times: Thursday – Saturday 8 PM
Sunday 5 PM

Cooper and Bennett are not a gay couple- just a couple of gays. When one of their friends is the victim of an assault outside a local bar, they feel helpless, frightened, and then they feel something new: pure, unfiltered rage. Angry Fags asks the question “Is anyone really afraid of gay guys?”  This dark comedy explores the ideas of gay terrorism and the hypocrisy of American politics.

Topher Payne

Justin Anderson

An Oscar Wilde-meets-Fight Club fever dream about how good ideas go bad, with fascinating forays into American politics, bomb building, and pistachios.

The Cast

Bennett Riggs:  Jacob York

Cooper Harlow: Johnny Drago

Senator Allison Haines: Melissa Carter

Adam Lowell: John Benzinger

Kimberly Phillips:  Suehyla El-Attar

Peggy Musgrove:  Marcie Millard

Detective Preston:  Michael Henry Harris

Download a copy of the Angry Fags program to you Smartphone

Angry Fags is currently in development.  It faced its first audience in a reading at The Process Theatre Company’s Play Day in November, 2011.  The workshop cast was Nicholas Tecosky, Johnny Drago, Googie Uterhardt, Dianne Butler, Amanda Cucher, Jennifer Lee, and Rial Ellsworth.

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7 Stages is committed to protecting your privacy. This Statement of Privacy applies to 7 Stages Web site and governs data collection and usage at all 7 Stages sites and services; it does not apply to other online or offline sites, products or services. Please read the 7 Stages Statement of Privacy. 7 Stages is a general audience web site, intended for users of all ages. Personal information of all users is collected, used and disclosed as described in this Statement of Privacy.

Collection of your Personal Information

As an E-commerce Web site, 7 Stages collects personal information, such as your e-mail address, name, home or work address or telephone number. Information collected by 7 Stages is used solely for the purpose of billing and shipping your online purchases. 7 Stages does not collect any information about your computer hardware and software. 7 Stages encourages you to review the privacy statements of Web sites you choose to link to from 7 Stages so that you can understand how those Web sites collect, use and share your information. We are not responsible for the privacy statements or other content on Web sites outside of the 7 Stages Web site.

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7 Stages does not offer refunds or cancellations  on tickets.

FAT BOY – New Work
November 8- 18
Show times: Thursday – Saturday 8 PM
Sunday 5 PM
Written & Directed by Teo Castellanos

7 Stages introduces Atlanta to Fat Boy!  Teo Castellanos and his dance project infuses hip-hop with ritual to shine a light on the “Me” era.  Fat Boy is corporate greed and the 99%.  Fat Boy is the link between the prison industrial complex and the rice paddies of Southeast Asia.  Fat Boy will leave you in awe.

Teo Castellanos got the inspiration for his new theater piece Fat Boy from someone who was anything but: a crippled beggar at a train station in Mumbai, five years ago. Castellanos, traveling with his wife and 14-year-old daughter, was overwhelmed by the scale and intensity of poverty in India — the seemingly endless rows of people sleeping on sidewalks, the children begging in the streets. The stress and guilt he felt were exacerbated by the young man pushing himself along on a makeshift cart, following Castellanos and his family through the crowds.

The piece explores the contrast between the greed, materialism and seemingly relentless desire for more that Castellanos sees as driving American culture, with the desperate need, necessary frugality and — sometimes — contentment of other, less materialistic and prosperous countries. “The idea was how fat our nation is,” Castellanos says. “We’re wasteful in so many ways. We’re constantly consuming, and mass consumption leads to weight gain, which leads to ill health. I think we are in a state of ill spiritual, emotional and mental health. We’re in constant fear of not having enough.”

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Workshop with Teo Castellanos

This workshop led by acclaimed actor/writer/director Teo Castellanos offers participants an opportunity to develop original material or works-in-progress through movement. Work with universal rhythms, imagination, atmosphere, and archetypes will spark creativity and shape the developmental process. Participants will work barefoot or with dance shoes and will need to wear movement clothes. Teo Castellanos is the artistic director of Teo Castellanos D-Projects, a dance/theater company influenced by ritual and hip-hop.  Tuesday, November, 13 at 7 PM. Ages 16 and up.

Lay of the Land
Written & Performed by Tim Miller
November 10 – 13

Gay and human rights activist Tim Miller returns to 7 Stages with his all new queer tale. LAY OF THE LAND is Tim Miller’s saucy, sharp-knifed look at the State of the Queer Union during a time of trial! LAY OF THE LAND friskily gets at that feeling of gay folks being perpetually on trial, on the ballot, and on the menu! LAY OF THE LAND is a “lay” in all kinds of ways: a sex-assignation, a queer citizenship map, and of course a narrative ballad with a recurrent refrain! The L.A times calls Lay of the Land, “a vivid must see achievement.”

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SPECIAL EVENTS for Lay of the Land

Thursday November 10, 2011 -Post-show Talk-back

Friday November 11 – Post show After Party join us for wine, cheese and live music.

Saturday November 12, 2011 11 am-2 pm – Tim Miller Workshop THIS WORKSHOP IS FOR PEOPLE TO GATHER TOGETHER AND EXPLORE CREATING ORIGINAL PERFORMANCES

Saturday, November 12,2011 – Post-show Talk-back

GET LAID!
Queer Citizen Tim Miller on the Lay of the Land
by Tim Miller

I have always had the ability to regard the lay of the land and I will be sharing some of my kinky perspectives with Atlanta at 7 Stages with my show aptly called LAY OF THE LAND . When I was a very little boy- at a time when my favorite wooden puzzle was called RIDE A COCK HORSE – there was a kiddies show I loved called ROMPER ROOM. It was on for decades and if you are over twenty-eight years old, you probably had a Romper Room period in your life. Each episode had a segment in which the kindly woman Miss Something or Other would reach out to greet various kiddie viewers in TV LAND – by first name only – using her magic mirror. She would look directly into the camera and thus into our child-souls. She would hold up a mirror to her face, and would look lovingly into it. We would get some TV psychedelic-spiral special effects, and the glass part of the mirror would disappear and there would just be an open circle with a handle – and she would say several names. (“I see Jimmy and Bobby and Susie and Billy …”) There were never many Lakeeshas or Javiers mentioned when I was a kid. It was uncanny if you heard your name read on TV. (“I see Timmy being stripped naked and pawed by handsome, hirsute coal-miners….” Wow! Miss So-And-So saw me!) I have always had this ability too. I can really see the LAY OF THE LAND and know what is happening everywhere in queer America. I just hold that mirror in front of my eyes.

After Proposition 8 passed in California and my home state joined the other 45 H8 states – including Illinois- where gay folks are denied these fundamental rights, I found myself marching with a quarter of a million folks in hundreds of cities in all fifty states protesting the anti-gay laws that passed on Election Day 2008 in California, Florida, Arkansas and Arizona. I was preparing to premiere the very first chunk of a brand new show here in Chicago at Links Hall and I knew I was going to have to access the Romper Room mirror to see WTF is going on in our lunatic asylum of a country. Voila LAY OF THE LAND, my saucy, sharp-knifed look at the State of the Queer Union during a time of trial! Careening out of that Marriage Equality street protest to my sexy misadventures performing in 43 States, to, to the electoral assaults on gay folks all over the country, to my life as a grade-school flag monitor, to choking on cheap meat caught in my 10 year old gay boy’s throat, LAY OF THE LAND friskily gets at that feeling of gay folks being perpetually on trial, on the ballot, and on the menu! LAY OF THE LAND is a “lay” in all kinds of ways: a sex-assignation, a queer citizenship map, and of course a narrative ballad with a recurrent refrain! (my favorite way-down-the-list definition for “lay”!)

I travel a lot. At least 30 states a year. I sometimes feel like a performing “queer Johnny Appleseed- which is a bit redundant since Johnny Appleseed is widely thought to actually have been gay. Johny Appleseed was a Walt Whitmany queer fleeing the bourgeois family duties back east for adventures in the world of men in the west! Yeehaw! Plus those apples he was planting weren’t baking apples. Nope, they were only good for hard cider drinking and partying. Johnny Appleseed was a queer Dionysus bringing joy and fermentation to the new nation!

As I do the Lord’s work trying to undo homophobia- seriously- I often call on my animal spirit guides. Since I do a ton of University gigs all over the country as I throw my luggage together for my college engagements, I often imagine that all the animal mascots of these institutions of higher learning I work at are gathering to help me. Just as the mice and birds in Cinderella’s Disney garret pimp her up for the Ball, I visualize the animal mascots of the Upper Midwest preparing me. I see Illinois State University’s Reggie Redbird getting in on the Disney action and dressing me in my So-Out-They-Are-In cargo pants that I have had to sleep in on the nasty carpet at O’Hare during many airport snow storms. I see University of Minnesota’s Goldy Gopher with his scary teeth pulling my roller bag out of the closet. I see Northwestern University’s Willie Wildcat fluffing my naturally curly hair, I see Wisconsin’s Bucky Badger – the sexiest of all the mascots because he has been seriously working out and is wearing no pants! – meeting me for a quickie in the airport public restrooms reserved for closeted Republican Senator to help me face the horrors of changing planes in Dallas or Dulles!

I hold up that Romper Room mirror and I can really see the Lay of the Land. I see everything, my gaze flying over the states. I can see French Lick, Indiana and Morehead, Kentucky. I see Fort Gay, West Virginia and Nellieburg, Missisippi. These are real places! Is this a queer country or what? I can even see the Statue of Liberty all the way from Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago! Have you ever noticed how butch, how gender-fuck the Statue of Liberty is? Uh oh, I see Liberty is choking. America is choking on that MSG-laced piece of tough homophobia trapped in our national throat. I quickly fly through the mirror to New Your harbor and do the Heimlich maneuver on the Statue of Liberty, which is not easy through all that cooper! The Statue coughs up a nasty chunk of homophobic gristle that is choking our nation and also four Supreme Court Justices who stand between us and freedom: Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia, who explodes in a toxic cloud when he hits the water.

The Statue of Liberty whips off that tired copper Mu Mu and Planet of the Apes tiara and lifts that suspiciously vibrator-esque lamp and I hear Liberty sing out the new slam poetry written there on that statue.

“Give me your fierce faggots
your strong dykes.
Your huddled queer masses yearning to love free
Give me your working-class femmes with Lee press-on nails
Your activist queer boys who make out in jails.
…. your cowboy homos in buttless chaps and such
your U-hauling lezzies who move in together too much!
Give me your hope! Your heart. Your queer self possession.
Your families, your future and fierce sex transgression.
I lift my lamp beside this open closet door.
Come out shout out where ever you are.
Welcome.
We’re home.”

DRACULA: The Rock Opera
September 13- October 14
Show times: Thursday – Saturday 8 PM
Sunday 7 PM
Saturday, September 29 at 2 PM
(a full performance of Dracula: The Rock Opera as part of the Little Five Fest)
Composed by Rob Thompson, Naomi Lavender, Sam McPherson
and Chris Love
Directed by Del Hamilton with Justin Welborn

Executive Producers Susan Booth & Max Leventhal,Margaret Baldwin & Paul Pendergrass,
and Andrew Wilson & Giannella Alvarez

Associate Producers Christine Tryba & David Harn Cofrin, Michael McEachin, Bobbie Paul, Eliza Kelley,
Suzzane & Brett Mertens, Kim & Wes Bennett, Wilder Minds LLC, Rubicon Studios, Robert Cain, Carmen Stan and Molly Lay Robert M. Cain, Architect, AIA, LEED AP, Lisa Mount & MK Wegmann, Rebecca & Scot Safon, Frank Heibert,
Dr Michael Sampson, James Merelli, and Daniel Shwartzberg

Atlanta’s L5P Rock Star Orchestra takes you back to Transylvania. DRACULA: THE ROCK OPERA brings Bram Stokers’ chilling novel to life with sex, blood, and rock & roll. Experience a theatrical concert event like no other. This wild musical journey features stunning visual effects, sultry choreography, and a live band rockin’ out to a new vision of this classic tale.

KRAMPUS XMAS SPECTACULAR – A World Premiere Krampus Tale
DECEMBER 8, 9 & 10 2011 @ 9 PM
Created by 7 Stages & Java Lords
Directed by Heidi S. Howard

Make naughty the new nice this season as Krampus, German’s twisted counterpart to Saint Nick, returns to 7 Stages. This year Krampus and his motley crew of rock and roll friends go on a search for the true messiah. Rock out with your stocking out this Holiday season.

Your holiday tradition returns with an all new story!  Krampus is back and meaner than ever. Following his abduction of a certain little match girl named Gretchen, the Krampus and his reluctant companion are pulled up to that office christmas party in the sky, where they will witness first hand the deciding moment that will change mankind forever.

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Other Events
The Freaks Come out at Night Krampus Krawl, Saturday, December 3, 2011

The Krampus Krawl is back a bigger then ever. This year we join forces with our friends at Fabrefaction as we celebrate not only Krapmus, but their production of Rocky Horror. So get out your Freak Glam on and Krawl with us through Little Five Points on Saturday Dec 3 starting at 6:30 PM. For Details please call 404.523.7647

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