The Public Theater

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$20 tickets on sale now for performances March 9 - 14

ONLINE
Click here to purchase tickets online.

PHONE
Call 212-967-7555

IN PERSON
Visit the Public Theater Box Office, 425 Lafayette Street

Public LAB, a vital new play series conceived in association with LAByrinth Theater Company, is designed to respond to new work immediately, and present fresh, raw, and relevant plays that embrace The Public’s history as a theater receptive to the big issues, the public issues of our time. In so doing, this innovative program creates a new model for the ways in which The Public engages with our artists and audience. With minimally designed productions and short rehearsal periods, Public Lab gives writers the essential opportunity to develop new work with a director, designers, and actors and to see their work in front of an audience. Public LAB also provides our audience with access to new plays in development at affordable ticket prices.

Public LAB: Neighbors

Public LAB Series 2010
NEIGHBORS
By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Directed by Niegel Smith

EXTENDED!
Playing Now - March 14

Have you seen the new neighbors? Richard Patterson is not happy. The family of black actors that has moved in next door is rowdy, tacky, shameless, and uncouth. And they are not just invading his neighborhood—they’re infiltrating his family, his sanity, and his entirely post-racial lifestyle. This wildly theatrical, explosive play on race marks the major debut of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, member of the Public’s Emerging Writers Group.

NEIGHBORS may not be appropriate for children.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE Tues at 7pm; Wed–Fri at 8pm; Sat at 2 & 8pm; Sun at 2 & 7pm

TUESDAY NIGHT PUBLIC LAB SPEAKER SERIES: Please join us for the Public LAB Speaker Series, Tuesday nights following the performance, which will consist of engaging post-show conversations with the artists and notable panelists.

Tuesday, February 23
Racial Masquerade
Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson talks with Daphne Brooks (author of Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary), Chay Yew (playwright/director) and Niegel Smith (director of Neighbors).

Tuesday, March 2
Writing After August
Tracey Scott Wilson (The Good Negro) talks with playwrights Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Neighbors), Nathan Louis Jackson (Broke-ology) and Katori Hall (The Mountaintop) about their own writing and the shadow of August Wilson.

CLICK HERE to read the New York Times feature "New Play Puts an Old Face on Race" (Feb 3, 2010)

VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS AND NIEGEL SMITH

FROM THE PLAYWRIGHTS BOOKSHELF
The Bacchae and Other Plays by Euripides
   By Euripides, Translated by James Morwood
The Black Book
   edited Middleton A. Harris et al.
The Colored Museum
   a play by George C. Wolfe
Forgeries of Memory & Meaning: Blacks & the Regimes of Race in American Theater & Film Before World War II
   By Cedric J. Robinson
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Working Class
   by Eric Lott
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
   Images by Kara Walker, text by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman,
   Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr, Kevin
   Young, & Yasmil Raymond