New York, NY (March 30th, 2006) – OBIE Award winning Clubbed Thumb is proud to present their 11th annual summer festival of new plays, Summerworks 2006. The entire festival takes place at The Ohio Theatre (66 Wooster Street btwn. Spring and Broome) beginning June 4th at 8 PM and ending this breakneck month with their last mainstage production on June 24th . Tickets for all shows are $18/ $15 for students. Opening night event on Wednesday May 31st is FREE! To purchase tickets in advance please call Theatermania.com at 212.352.3101 or by going to www.theatermania.com. For more information, go to www.clubbedthumb.org or call 212.802.8007.

I Have Loved Strangers
by Anne Washburn, directed by Johanna McKeon (last year’s Boris Sagal Fellow at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where she developed I Have Loved Strangers with the playwright).
Inspired by the Book of Jeremiah, and the exploits of the Weather Underground, I Have Loved Strangers is a play about true prophets, false prophets, non prophets, cockatrices, and lions all battling for the salvation of Ancient New York.
June 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 10th at 8 PM.

Alice the Magnet
by Erin Courtney, directed by Pam MacKinnon (recent directing credits include Gina Gionfriddo’s After Ashley at Philadelphia Theatre Company, Itamar Moses’ Bach at Leipzig at New York Theatre Workshop and David Mamet’s Romance at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago).
In Alice the Magnet, an influential self-improvement guru suddenly finds herself lost. Will a wayward student and his even more wayward teacher be the solution, or part of the problem? Their lives become intertwined in this story about power, charisma, fear, and mentors gone awry.
June 11th, 12th, 13th, 15th, 16th, 17th at 8 PM

Quail
by Rachel Hoeffel, directed by Kip Fagan (recently directed Kristen Kosmas’s The Mayor of Baltimore and Anthem at Dixon Place).
Hapless legal secretary Arlene Quail must deal with her boss’s incessant smoking, alluring and seductive clients, and her own search for purpose, all while trying to maintain the collapsing two-man firm. If only she could get the window open.
June 18th, 19th, 20th, 22nd, 23rd, 24th at 8 PM

Take 5: a half-decade check-in
To open the Summerworks 2006 festival, Clubbed Thumb has invited a group of exciting playwrights to write funny strange, and provocative 5-minute playlets mined from the tumult of the last 5 years.
Wednesday, May 31st at 8PM FREE

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS:

Anne Washburn’s plays have been produced and/or developed by 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, Cherry Lane Theater, The Civilians, Dixon Place, New York Theater Workshop, The Public Theater, Soho Rep, Williamstown Theater Festival. She is an associate artist with the Obie award winning theater groups 13Pand the Civilians, and a member of New Dramatists. She has her MFA from NYU.

Erin Courtney’s plays have been produced or developed by Clubbed Thumb (Demon Baby, Pricked, Summer Play, Downwinders), The Public Theater and Birmingham Repertory, BRIC, The Vineyard (Alice The Magnet), The Flea (Mother’s Couch), and The Actors Theater of Louisville (Owls). Most recently, her play Quiver And Twitch was developed in the Soho Rep writers/directors lab and was presented as a reading in the Prelude 2005 festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell colony, a recipient of a NYSCA grant and a MAP Fund grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and a member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director lab. Her play Owls is published by Smith and Kraus in “Humana Festival 2001: The Complete Plays” and Demon Baby is published in the anthology “New Downtown Now” edited by Mac Wellman and Young Jean Lee and published by University of Minnesota Press. She currently teaches playwriting at Brooklyn College and is an affiliated artist with Clubbed Thumb. She is also a member of 13P, as well as the co-founder of the Brooklyn Writer’s Space.

Rachel Hoeffel has had plays workshopped and developed in New York with The Ensemble Studio Theater, Soho Rep, The Flea, HERE, Little Theater at Tonic, Williamstown Director’s Lab and Clubbed Thumb. She received an Alfred P. Sloan commission in 1999, a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2002, and a Yaddo fellowship in 2004. She worked on and participated in Pataphysics: Workshops for Playwrights at the Flea from 2000-2005. She has a BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a recently certified teacher of the Alexander Technique. She is currently working on her first novel.

Founded in 1996 by artistic directors Maria Striar and Meg MacCary, the OBIE Award-winning Clubbed Thumb has become one of New York City’s foremost theater companies developing and producing new American plays. World premiere productions have included Gina Gionfriddo’s U.S. Drag (2002 Susan Smith Blackburn prize winner), Lisa D’Amour’s 16 Spells to Charm the Beast, Ethan Lipton’s 100 Aspects of the Moon, Adam Bock’s The Typographer’s Dream, Sheils Callahan’s Crumble, Rinne Groff’s Inky and Jimmy Carter Was a Democrat, and most recently the critically acclaimed productions of Erin Courtney’s Demon Baby and What Then by Rinne Groff.