News: In Scena! Italian Theater Festival presents "The Rule of Thirds" as part of Emerging Directors’ Mentorship Program

Director Montgomery Sutton
In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY, New York City’s premiere festival of Italian theater happening in all five boroughs, will present The Rule of Thirds, written by 2025 In Scena! Playwright Award-winner Marco De Simone, translated by Caterina Nonis, and directed by Montgomery Sutton at The Tank (312 W 36th St., New York, NY 10018), April 22-May 15.

Over the years, In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY has proudly presented the staged production of plays that have won the Mario Fratti Award, now known as the In Scena! Playwright Award. Since 2025, as part of its commitment to fostering artistic growth, In Scena! in collaboration with The Tank, has offered a Mentorship in Directing to an emerging director. This year’s selected director, Montgomery Sutton, will have the opportunity to direct a play chosen from among the winners of the In Scena! Playwright Award, while receiving a mentorship from a seasoned director, Debora Balardini, and an experienced producer from the Kairos Italy Theater’s team. Sutton is a director, actor, playwright, and teacher, as well as the founder and Master of the Revels for Rude Grooms, a Queens-based theater creating epicly intimate theatrical experiences rooted in the actor-audience relationship exemplified by Shakespeare's acting company. The play is produced by Kairos Italy Theater for In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY and presented in collaboration with The Tank NYC.

The Rule of Thirds is inspired by a real event recounted in the autobiography of Robert Capa. Southeastern Sicilian hinterland, at dawn on Saturday, July 10, 1943. A farmer welcomes war photojournalist Robert Capa into his farmhouse after he parachuted onto the island the night before the Allied landing. Their dialogue highlights the photographer’s strong personality and his wealth of anecdotes, shaped by firsthand experience in war zones. In the background, the farmer becomes the voice of the “thirds”—the vast mass of civilians who remain outsiders to the warring factions. Like the photographic rule suggests, these individuals demand to be brought into focus to tell another story—their own—hidden beneath the Grand Historical Narrative. 

Playwright Marco De Simone is an author, actor and musician. A graduate of the Conservatory in Classical Guitar and with a master's degree in Philosophy, he has been writing for the theater since 2016. His texts It Never Happened and The Smell of the Moon have received national awards; his show We, Puppets, in which he is also a performer, has been performed more than 40 times in Italy and abroad. He has four musicals to his credit and numerous collaborations with contemporary theater and dance companies, for which he has written stage music, scripts and adaptations.

Performances of The Rule of Thirds will take place on:
Wednesday, April 22 at 9:30pm 
Thursday, April 23 at 9:30pm 
Saturday, April 25 at 3pm (Opening)
Sunday, April 26 at 3pm
Thursday, April 30 at 7pm
Saturday, May 2 at 7pm
Wednesday, May 6 at 7pm
Friday, May 15 at 9:30pm

Tickets ($20-$30) are available for advance purchase at thetanknyc.org. The performance will run approximately 80 minutes, with no intermission.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: "How To Eat an Orange" Cuts into the Life of an Argentine Artist and Activist

Image
How To Eat an Orange Written by Catherine Filloux Based on the writing of Claudia Bernardi Directed by Elena Araoz Presented by La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club at The Downstairs at La MaMa 66 E 4th St., Manhattan, NYC May 30-June 16, 2024 Paula Pizzi. Photo by Steven Pisano How To Eat an Orange , making its world premiere at La MaMa, does in fact include a real orange as a prop, and its multifarious symbolizations–evoking at different points cultural specificity, family history, matriarchal inheritance, and even a skull–are representative of the play's boundary-blurring, non-linear presentation of memory. The memories in question belong to visual artist, educator, and activist Claudia Bernardi , who lived through several years of her native Argentina's military junta, which held power from 1976 to 1983, before departing her country and eventually settling in the United States. How To Eat an Orange , from Catherine Filloux, a French Algerian American award-winning playwright,...
Read more

Review: The Immersive "American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams" Takes Audiences on a Marvelously Crafted Journey

Image
American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by the Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NYC October 27-November 26, 2023 Shadenia Savid in Moony's Kids Don't Cry . Photo by Natasha Rotondaro In 1948, Tennessee Williams published American Blues , a collection of five one-act plays, and a remarkable new production of this collection by Brooklyn's Irondale shows that these works have lost none of their power to both entertain and challenge audiences in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Comprising plays written in the decade between 1936 and 1946 - Moony's Kids Don't Cry (1936); The Dark Room (1939); The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941); The Long Stay Cut Short, or, the Unsatisfactory Supper (1946); and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1946) - American Blues represents the second part of Irondale's American Century, the first install...
Read more

Review: From Child Pose to Stand(ing) Up: "Yoga with Jillian" and "Penguin in Your Ear" at the Women in Theatre Festival

Image
Yoga with Jillian Written by Lia Romeo Directed by Andrew W. Smith Presented by Project Y Theatre and Richard Jordan Productions in association with The Pleasance June 2-17, 2023 Penguin in Your Ear Written and performed by Eliza Bent Directed by Jess Barbagallo June 10, 2023 Part of the Women in Theatre Festival , presented by Project Y Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres Michole Biancosino. Photo courtesy of Project Y Theatre This June, Project Y Theatre Company presents the eighth annual installment of its Women in Theatre Festival (WIT), which showcases new work by women and maintains "more than 50% female representation of all artists involved." This year, the festival includes a lobby installation project, titled In the Betweens , from scenic designer Chen-Wei Liao, through which audience members pass on their way into the theater proper. One first chooses first between "light" and "dark" rooms and then moves into "the gardens" before re...
Read more