Photo Flash: First Look at AliveWire Theatrics' YOU WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE

AliveWire Theatrics presents the World Premiere of You Will Make A Difference, a collaboratively devised performance conceived and directed by Jeremy Goren. You Will Make A Difference runs from October 19 to November 11 at the West Park Presbyterian Church, located at 165 West 86th Street (at Amsterdam Avenue) in New York City. Previews begin October 19 for an October 21 opening. Get a first look at the production in the photos below!

Drawing on material as diverse as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, medieval pageant plays, '90s suburbia, My So-Called Life, and the performers’ own stories, You Will Make A Difference explores our current moment - career, love, babies and success. An ensemble leads its audience through various spaces on several floors of the beautiful West Park Presbyterian Church. Formed over an atypical, six-month process, this collaboratively devised performance invites the audience on a journey to discover where they really are. The communal ending of You Will Make A Difference includes a small, shared meal prepared by Artist/Chef Anne Apparu, along with music and a hoedown or some other happening, to create an experience unlike any other. Apparu will also create full meals as part of extended performances on Saturday, October 20 and Sunday, November 11.

The ensemble includes Stephanie Eiss, Tara Elliott, Jeff Kitrosser, Nicki Kontolefa, Laura Riveros, Derek Spaldo and Martha Frances Liv Williams, along with Ben Lambert, Claire Lebowitz, Rishika Mehrishi, Samantha Rivers Cole, Courtney Ross, and a rotating group of guest performers.

The creative and production team includes Chana Porter (Producer), Eric Borlaug (Producer), Scott Rodrigue (Production Manager), Sandy Yaklin (Set Design), Jess Greenberg (Lighting Design), Bridget Durkin (Video Editor & Production Associate) and Shelley Molad (Assistant Director & Stage Manager).

AliveWire Theatrics conducts work that is Connective, Charged and Current. We are staffed exclusively by an expanding collaboration of artists who facilitate each others’ work. These core members strive to empower the agency of plays and help them come into their own. Grounded in our belief that artistic action must follow through until it reaches an audience, AliveWire is dedicated to discovering and implementing new and evolving circuitry to make these projects happen.

Jeremy Goren is a performer, managing director and assistant to Founding Artistic Director Polina Klimovitskaya at Terra Incognita Theater, which he joined in 2005. He has participated in the development and performance of Terra’s A Taste of Honey, Pebble-and-Cart Cycle: Parts I-III, and the ongoing works Speech-less, I Take Good Care of My Corpse, and Moving Landscape, the public-space performance series that he produces as well. In 2011, he co-led a workshop at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center as a Lincoln Center Directors Lab Master Artist. Goren is currently the inaugural A/M/P Resident at AliveWire Theatrics and a Black Studio Resident at CAVE. He has performed in dozens of works in New York and elsewhere since 2004. Goren holds degrees in Spanish Language and Literature, Latin American Studies, and Journalism from Brandeis University.

Artist/Chef Anne Apparu will be creating small “bites to share the moment” for each performance of You Will Make A Difference. She will also prepare two larger meals as part of two extended performances on October 20 and November 11. Apparu gathers the freshest most vibrant local produce and serves them for shared moments to groups of people, often strangers. Her culinary vision is to have the eaters fed with the purest foods to allow them energy to share their best self. In 2006 she opened Chop Shop with her sister Agathe Snow and friend Marianne Vitale. Following the artistic success of the One Stop Holidays Emergency Shop, they opened Letters of the Sunday Restaurant at Beatrice Inn. Apparu continues to collaborate with friends and carries on with caterings and food performances of all sorts.

Jeremy Goren is AliveWire’s inaugural A/M/P Resident: a program launched last November to empower agency within the NYC theater community, open new channels of artistic collaboration, and explore do-it-with-others production models. An AMP is a unit of electrical current, a device that increases the amplitude of a signal, and an Artist/Member/Producer. This program invites one applicant each year to join AliveWire for a 12 month period as an artistic collaborator, voting company member, and co-producer. Each residency culminates with a fully staged production of the project proposed in the resident’s application.

You Will Make A Difference was created in part through the Black Studio Residency at CAVE in Williamsburg. Performances are Fridays – Sundays at 8pm. Tickets, priced at $25, go on sale October 5 at http://www.AliveWireTheatrics.com. The space is accessible from the #1, B or C train to 86th St.

Photo Credit: Charlie Winter