EST/Sloan Project
The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project is an initiative designed to stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.
The partnership between the Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is the creative engine behind hundreds of new American plays that challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact in our lives. Plays from the EST/Sloan Project are produced again and again across the country. This begins at EST’s home base in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, for forty years a crucial platform for new and unheard voices in the American theatre. Over the past twelve years, this reputation has been enhanced by the critically acclaimed productions presented on the theatre’s Mainstage every season under the banner of the EST/Sloan Project.
Beyond New York, the program now has a nationwide reach. It supports development and production of new plays in theatres across the country through a combination of seed grants and production incentives. These initiatives provide an extended life for EST/Sloan plays in subsequent regional productions, and the seed grants provide a broader base of artistic opportunity for communities outside of New York, allowing the program to cast a wider net for new work.
The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project is currently accepting proposals and scripts for its 2012-2013 season.
The submission deadline is November 1st, 2011.
Recent EST/Sloan Project Production
First Light 2011
When a new telescope focused on the heavens becomes operational, the initial images it sees are called First Light. For thirteen years, the EST/Sloan Project has led a pioneering nationwide effort to commission, develop and present hundreds of new plays that challenge and broaden the view of science in the popular imagination.
Presented by the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Schedule: April 3 – 23, 2011
April 20 – 23 at 7pm, with a 2pm matinee on April 23
EST/Sloan RoughCut Workshop Production:
Pidgeon by Tommy Smith, directed by William Carden*
With Theremin Music by Jen Rondeau
Set in depression-era New York City and Stalinist Russia, Pidgeon follows the exploits of Leon Theremin, Soviet inventor and father of electronic music. When Theremin marries a whipsmart black prima ballerina, their expatriate romance shocks society and attracts the looming shadow of foreign terror.
EST/Youngblood presents: A BRUNCH HISTORY OF TIME:
The Youngblood Science Brunch
Join the playwrights of Youngblood as they merrily push past their complete ignorance of science to ponder the really big questions. Grand queries of the universe will be answered at A BRUNCH HISTORY OF TIME, with a bonus buffet of pancakes, bacon, and (Young)bloody marys at Youngblood’s fiscally questionable, morally reprehensible open bar. A perennial sellout, get your tickets now!
Monday, April 4 at 7pm
Please Continue by Frank Basloe
Yale, early 1960s. Professor Stanley Milgram’s “obedience experiments” test how cruel people can be when they are just following orders. Milgram gets the data he needs, but the lab assistant who conducted the experiment is left to grapple with his own cruelty, a dilemma echoed by unexpected crimes on campus. Please Continue examines the conditions under which we allow ourselves to inflict harm.
Tuesday, April 5 at 7pm
Fast Company by Carla Ching
Mable Kwan was a famous grifter who taught her sons the long con, and how to be an expert roper and fixer. Tired of the life, Francis retired and became a magician. H became a sports writer. Blue, the youngest and the only girl, always kept out of the family trade, now studies game theory and may become the best con artist of the family. The estranged trio is called home to Mable’s deathbed. With a small fortune at stake, will they be able to break old habits? Or who will con who in the end?
Thursday, April 7 at 7pm
Smash by Robert Askins
Directed by David P. Moore*
It’s 1993 and the biggest particle collider in the world is being built in Waxahatchie, Texas. As project head, Alan is the hometown boy made good. Never mind that the hometown didn’t like him too much and his bosses need his accent more than his mind. He’s living his dream until things start to slip: Bill Clinton is in the White House and Congress is out of money. All of a sudden, atoms aren’t the only thing about to get busted apart.
Friday, April 8 at 3pm
The Secret Life of Arthropods and Rodents by Cori Thomas*
Maricela, recently out of prison and looking for gainful employment, begins a journey to become a Pest Control Engineer. Little does she know a bed bug epidemic looms…
Monday, April 11 at 8pm
@The 52nd Street Project, 789 10th Avenue
ADA
Composed by Kim Sherman, Libretto by Margaret Vandenburg,
Directed by Lisa Rothe, Musical direction by Kim Grigsby
An opera on the life of Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and widely credited with writing the first computer program. Like her father before her, Ada embarks on a Romantic quest that rebels against Victorian restraint, creating a revolutionary language of numbers that was way ahead of her time.
Tuesday, April 12 at 3pm
Big Hungry World by Susan Bernfield
Catherine is a Silicon Valley billionaire who wants to give away her money – she thinks. Always a perfectionist, she is determined that her charity be as efficient and effective as everything else she’s done in her life. But feeding the world is an unruly, messy business, where the rules she learned – and invented – don’t apply. A play in three parts about goodness in the context of great privilege, and the moral value of work.
Tuesday, April 12 at 7pm
Separation of Blood by Bridgette Wimberly*
Dr. Charles Drew encountered many separations throughout his life. The discoverer of the groundbreaking method of separating and preserving blood for safe transfusions and the driving force behind the first blood bank in the world was himself unable, like all African Americans, to receive a blood transfusion. On the night of April 1, 1950, in a long perilous drive through the south, he set out to change that.
Thursday, April 14 at 3pm & Friday, April 15 at 7pm
@The Vault (LMCC’s Swing Space), 14 Wall street, Level B
Flatland by Sinking Ship Ensemble
(Conceived and Directed by Jon Levin,
from the 1884 novella by Edwin A. Abbott )
On the last night before the new Millennium, A. Square, an inhabitant of Flatland, is visited by a Sphere from the land of three dimensions. Sphere takes him on a journey to discover the true nature of the universe. But in Flatland, the notion of a third dimension is heresy, and one who preaches such heresy must be silenced. Using puppetry, physical theater and technology from overhead projectors to lasers, Flatland tells the story of a search to comprehend the world beyond our experience.
Monday, April 18 at 7pm
A Lady Alone
by Lynn Eckert, Christine Farrell*, and Kevin Confoy*,
Directed by Kevin Confoy*
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to receive an MD degree from an American medical school. A Lady Alone is a one-woman play about a life that spanned the American Civil War and the most intriguing questions of science and the human condition at the top of the 20th century. Featuring Christine Farrell as Dr, Blackwell.
*denotes member of Ensemble Studio Theatre
London, 1953. Scientists are on the verge of discovering what they call the secret of life: the DNA double helix. Providing the key is driven young physicist Rosalind Franklin. But if the double helix was the breakthrough of the 20th century, then what kept Franklin out of the history books? A play about ambition, isolation, and the race for greatness.
Learn more at ensemblestudiotheatre.org/photograph-51