DIRECTOR | PRODUCER | CONSULTANT
Producer
STEALING SWEETS AND PUNCHING PEOPLE
by Phil Porter
Off Broadway, Summer Play Festival
Beckett Theater, New York
Producer: Madeline Austin
Director: Michael Sexton
Ensemble: Haley Gross, Elliot Joseph, Julia Gibson, Robert Stanton
Emily is sixteen. She lives with her dad and works in a junk shop with no customers. She's got a nose like a white strawberry, hair like a demented angel and a terrible, terrible secret…Adolescence, sexuality and guilt come together in this richly theatrical, macabre and often hilarious play about an ordinary life going badly wrong. Stealing Sweets and Punching People was produced at the Latchmere Theatre, London, in October 2003.
REVIEWS
“…There's the Fringe Festival, the Midtown International Theater Festival, the Hot! Festival, and HERE's 15th American Living Room series. And now there's the first annual Summer Play Festival, playing to sold-out houses, which threatens to trump them all.
…Obviously, the New Play Festival is an outstanding opportunity for everyone involved, and from what I've seen I can say that it's an outstanding festival. The quality is top-notch--from the scripts to the actors to the sets, it seems that no expense has been spared. The acting was uniformly exceptional, the direction was visionary, the design was imaginative and resourceful. Of the eighteen shows, I saw five, including one musical. The audiences at each event were responsive and engrossed, and many people saw more than one show.”
~ A CurtainUp - An Overview of the New Summer Play Festival by Jenny Sandman
“Back in New York, the Summer Play Festival, known as SPF, was a late entry into the 2004 theatre scene: It was announced last March by Broadway and Off-Broadway producer Arielle Tepper and ran July 5-Aug. 1.
…Unlike the O'Neill, where plays receive a bare-bones workshop—typically a series of staged readings—the works selected for the SPF are given budgets and other kinds of professional and administrative support, plus a high-profile Midtown run.” ~ Backstage