Photo Flash: Rising Phoenix Rep's BUSTED

Rising Phoenix Repertory announces the FOURTH PLAY IN THE CINO NIGHTS SERIES BUSTED a new play by Florencia Lozano / directed by Portia Krieger featuring Maggie Bofill, Audrey Esparza, Nate Miller, Puy Navarro, Ana Reeder, and Jeanine Serralles

Following the sold out performances and overflow crowds at its first three Cino Nights presentations of Gary Sunshine's BEST SEX EVER, Mando Alvarado's ON THE 5:31, and Courtney Baron's HERE I LIE, Rising Phoenix Rep continues the series on December 12th with Florencia Lozano's BUSTED.

Written by acclaimed writer and actress Lozano this season's underneathmybed at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and featuring Maggie Bofill The Leak/INTAR, Audrey Esparza Post No Bills/Rattlestick, Nate Miller Keep Your Baggage With You/Theater for the New City, Puy Navarro Blood Wedding/Repertorio Español, Ana Reeder Top Girls/MTC, and Jeanine Serralles Stunning/LCT3, BUSTED threatens:

"We're gunna take you out back and show you from whence you came."
--The Sisterhood

Inspired by Joe Cino and his Caffe Cino-one of the original birthplaces of Off-Off-Broadway theatre and early home to such writers as Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick, John Guare, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and William M. Hoffman-New York Innovative Theater Award winning company Rising Phoenix Rep has commissioned nineteen playwrights to write new, full-length plays for the Seventh Street Small Stage, the intimate back room space at Jimmy's No. 43 in the East Village, where the company has produced critically acclaimed and award winning productions for the past five years.

Rising Phoenix Rep artistic director Daniel Talbott described the series as a place to tap into the raw, inspired, inventive, and pioneering work of the Caffe Cino, where the love of theatre and new work was joined with a scrappy, do-it-yourself work ethic. All shows will be rehearsed for a week and then fully mounted and produced, warts and all, for one night only with free admission.

Cino Nights are currently scheduled through March 2012 and will celebrate the spirit of indie theatre as a home for new plays and theatre artists as well as hopefully honor what has been said of the Caffe Cino: "the first studio of theater where playwrights can experiment as painters and poets have done for a century, free from the tyranny of audience, box-office, church, and criticism."

The plays will be fully produced for one night only on a monthly basis through March 2012. The playwrights, in the order their plays will appear, are:

Florencia Lozano's BUSTED will be directed by Portia Krieger and performed on December 12, 2010 featuring Maggie Bofill, Audrey Esparza, Nate Miller, Puy Navarro, Ana Reeder, and Jeanine Serralles

Kristen Palmer's FEAST DAY: January 23, 2011; directed by Julie Kline

Reservations will be available one week before the performance each month. Seating is extremely limited. For reservations please call 212-946-5198; for more information please visit www.RisingPhoenixRep.org.

Playwright Florencia Lozano's play underneathmybed was just produced at the Rattletsick Playwrights Theater, thanks to David Van Asselt. LAByrinth Theatre Company is where she was born and raised as a writer and she has had two of her one acts, Charlie and Bitch Go Back To Charlie's House and Sheila, Jack, Clare Danes and The Man On My Roof read there under the stewardship of Bob Glaudini. Florencia was associate artistic director and literary manager at LAB for many years. Her new play is called girl in window and will be workshopped next year. Florencia created and produced a site-specific, street theatre performance piece three years ago called CHEZ MOI in collaboration with Monique Carboni and a company of women. As an actress she's done lots of stuff and now plays tough-as-nails Tea Delgado on ABC's One Life to Live.

Director Portia Krieger's NY directing credits include Too Little Too Late at HERE, Amy Herzog's Love Song in Two Voices at Ars Nova, Michael John Garces' in the Zone at Red Fern Theater, and the upcoming This is Not Antigone by Kate Walat at New Georges, along with projects at Rattlestick, the Lark, the Abingdon, EST/Youngblood, Origin Theater, and Slant Theater Project. Regional: Love Song in Two Voices at the Huntington, The Lover, Please Stop Talking, Aria da Capo at Williamstown. Portia is a Resident Artist at Examined Man Theater, where she is writing and developing a new play currently titled The Real Wolf. She has assisted directors Michael Greif, Nicholas Martin, Henry Wishcamper, Carolyn Cantor, Sam Gold, and Will Frears at WTF, LCT, Atlantic, MTC, Roundabout, and MCC. She's an alumna of Smith College, the Drama League Directors Project, and the 2009 Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, and a co-founder of the New Georges Jam.

Founded in 1999 by Artistic Director Daniel Talbott, Rising Phoenix Repertory began by producing an ongoing reading series of new plays and has continued to add workshops, festivals, and highly praised productions of new plays. Recent productions include the acclaimed, sold-out Off-Broadway runs of Slipping, produced with Piece by Piece Productions and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, and Too Much Memory also with Piece by Piece Productions which transferred to the New York Theatre Workshop's Fourth Street Theatre after winning the FringeNYC award for Outstanding Play in 2008. Other recent productions include Ceremony, Afterclap, Birthday and Don't Pet the Zookeeper Seventh Street Small Stage; 365 Days/365 Plays Jimmy's No. 43 and The Public Theater; What Happened When HERE Arts Center; Fall Forward part of the Sitelines/River to River festival produced by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; The Telling Trilogy including The Ride, 2006 NYIT Award Nominee - Outstanding Original Short Script- Crystal Skillman, Rules of the Universe Winner, 2007 NYIT Awards for Outstanding Original Short Script - Daniel Reitz and Director - Daniel Talbott, and Three Sisters both at the Seventh Street Small Stage; Gift by Mark Schultz and Ponies by Mike Batistick FringeNYC.