Boneyards is Back for 4: 10/17, 10/20, 11/2, 11/3

Philadelphia, PA – The ongoing seance-as-theatre experiment continues. After a successful run in the 2013 Philly Fringe BONEYARDS is back from the dead to rock your underworld just in time for Halloween. Same autobiographical, spooky show, same mouldering location, same real ghosts. 4 dates: 10/17, 10/20, 11/2 and 11/3. Tickets $10, seating is limited to 20.

Later this month Jeffrey Stanley discusses seance as performance art in the Washington Post. Stay tuned.

Press Contact: info@shiva3.com

10/7/13 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Philadelphia, PA – The ongoing seance-as-theatre experiment continues.  After a successful run in the 2013 Philly Fringe BONEYARDS is back from the dead to rock your underworld just in time for Halloween. Same autobiographical, spooky show, same mouldering location, same real ghosts. 4 dates: 10/17, 10/20, 11/2 and 11/3. Tickets $10, seating is limited to 20.

The hilarious, eloquent and haunting follow-up to Stanley’s 2011 hit “Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead,” this true to life romp resurrects the cadaverous–from Philly’s Laurel Hill Cemetery to a British colonial graveyard in India to ancient Greek tomb worshippers. Paranormal activity guaranteed.

Times, tickets, photos, press, playbill, and real voices from the dead here.

About Your Destination
Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and beyond crowded South Philadelphia in the 1880s.  They pushed south from the original “Jewish Quarter” near South Street, opening Jewish schools, hospitals and some 140 synagogues along the way. Hard to believe today, eh?  In 1909 members of Shivtei Yeshuron-Ezras Israel became tenants in this former storefront on the corner of South 4th and  Emily Streets (2015 S. 4th Street just two short blocks north of Snyder Avenue). In 1914 they bought the building and members of the congregation completed most of the renovations themselves.  Today it is virtually unchanged.  Similar to New York City’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the synagogue is a living memorial to turn-of-the-century immigrant life in Philadelphia.  An active core group of congregants continues  to hold monthly services in the synagogue, fondly nicknamed “the little shul,” and hopes to keep it alive as a religious, historical, artistic and cultural center in the neighborhood.   BONEYARDS is the first ever Fringe show to take place here.  Hopefully it’s the start of a trend.  More at http://www.thelittleshul.orgDoors open 45 minutes early to allow the audience time to wander the 3 floors of this 118-year-old storefront synagogue before descending to the cellar.

About the Show
A funeral for the living. A coming-of-age embalming. A suicidal decapitation by coal train. A cross-dressing hillbilly named Doodlebug. This metatheatrical, taphophilic, true-to-life monologue resurrects and converses with the cadaverous–from Philly’s Laurel Hill Cemetery to a British colonial era graveyard in India to ancient Greek tomb worshippers. Is there a meaning to the universe? Is the spirit world speaking to you right now through this press release? If so it should be testable, no? Thrill as Stanley points to a tombstone and researches the forgotten dead beneath it, forming connections with the deceased who rise to the surface halfway around the world in a Kolkata graveyard, and in his own Appalachian family. Shriek and shimmy as Stanley worships the dead in song. Be amazed as a live seance yields messages for audience members. Psychism? Telepathy? Subconscious ideomotor impulses? Watch, decide, leave smiling, healed and redeemed.  Paranormal activity guaranteed.

BONEYARDS. There’s a little taphophile in all of us.


About Writer-Performer Jeffrey Stanley
Jeffrey Stanley’s play Tesla’s Letters (Samuel French, 2000) premiered to rave reviews Off Broadway in 1999 and went on to national and international productions including the Edinburgh Fringe and most recently a Chicago premiere. He is a religion blogger for the Washington Post, and a performing arts faculty at both New York University Tisch School of the Arts and at Drexel University. Other plays include the 2003 Medicine, Man commissioned by the Mill Mountain Theatre in Virginia and most recently produced at Theatre Three Dallas, and Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead which premiered in the 2011 Philly Fringe. In the 2012 Philly Fringe he produced the classical Indian and Modern dance show Einstein/Tagore: Seashore of Endless Worlds. He was a 2011-12 artist-in-residence at Plays & Players Theatre. Stanley is a past president of the board of directors of the New York Neo-Futurists experimental theatre ensemble. He has been a resident of prestigious artists’ colony Yaddo, a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College, and a guest lecturer at the Imaginary Academy summer theatre and film workshop in Croatia sponsored by the Soros Foundation. He has appeared as a guest writer in The New York Times, New York Press and Time Out New York, and he was an editorial advisor to Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies’ book on apocalypse movements The End That Does (Equinox Books, 2006). Stanley holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing and a BFA in Film & Television from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Listings Information
What: BONEYARDS

When:
Thu 10/17/13 8pm
Sun 10/20/13 3pm
Sat 11/2/13 9pm
Sun 11/313 2pm
Doors open 45 minutes early to allow the audience time to wander the 3 floors of this century-old storefront synagogue before descending to the cellar.

Where:
Shivtei Yeshuron-Ezras Israel Synagogue
2015 S. 4th Street
Philadelphia, PA
in the coal cellar

Tickets:
$10, available at http://www.brain-on-fire.com/boneyards