Streptococci: A Love Story

©by brain-on-fire.com. All rights reserved.

a short romantic comedy about the flesh-eating disease
by Jeffrey Stanley

Goldie..........Heather Kenzie
Tudor........Joey Rizzolo

Directed by Jeffrey Stanley

Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 7:00pm
at the 2008 Algonquin Theater Short Play Festival
123 E. 24th Street
New York City

Tickets: $15.00
available from smarttix.com
or call the box office at 212/730-4664 to make a reservation

Heather Kenzie (Goldie), Off-Broadway: Guilty. Regional Theatre: The Archbishops' Ceiling (Westport Country Playhouse), All My Sons (Crossroads Theatre), Pride and Prejudice (Guthrie Theater), A Guthrie Experience, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Love of the Nightingale, and The Laramie Project (Rutgers Theater Company). Television: Law & Order, The P.A., All My Children, Guiding Light, As The World Turns. Film: Looking for May, Nine Lives, Acting 101, Summertime, Figment. Education: M.F.A. Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, NJ 2004. Awards: Kreidlemen Award 2004, Best Actor MGSA. She is appearing courtesy of Actors Equity Association.

Joey Rizzolo (Tudor) is a father, poet, carpenter, teacher, and performer from New Jersey. He teaches playwriting and performance to kids through various organizations including NJPAC. He has been involved in numerous spoken-word productions and as a poet was a Kennedy Center playwright-in-residence in 2005. During the Republican National Convention in 2004, Joey immersed himself in a fringe production called Bushwhackin, an attempt to subvert the re-election of George W. Bush (he failed, and he is very, very sorry). Since moving from Ohio where he performed with a Shakespeare company dedicated to offering free theater to rural communities, Joey has been writing and performing for the award-winning New York Neo-Futurists' ongoing show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind every Friday and Saturday night at the Kraine Theatre.

Jeffrey Stanley's (Writer-Director) semiautobiographical wartime drama Tesla's Letters (Samuel French, 2000) premiered to rave reviews Off Broadway in '99 and went on to international productions including the highly successful '07 Chicago premiere. Other plays include Fishing With Tony and Joe commissioned by The Ensemble Studio Theatre in '06, Medicine, Man (Custom House, 2008) commissioned by the Mill Mountain Theatre in '03 and most recently produced at Theatre Three Dallas in '05, and his autobiographical comedy show in which he starred at The Gershwin Hotel and Don't Tell Mama, The Golden Horseshoe: A Lecture on Tragedy in '04-'05. He also directs, including a racially reimagined New York revival of Sam Shepard's political comedy The God of Hell at The Big Little Theatre in '07. Stanley has been a resident of artists' colony Yaddo, a Copeland Fellow in Playwriting at Amherst College, a guest lecturer at the Imaginary Academy summer performing arts workshop in Croatia sponsored by the Soros Foundation, and he teaches screenwriting and playwriting in the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He has appeared as a guest writer in The New York Times and Time Out New York, and he was a senior advisor to Boston University's Center for Millennial Studies' book The End That Does (Equinox Books, 2006). Stanley holds an MFA from the Dramatic Writing Program at Tisch where he studied under playwright David Ives, and a BFA from Tisch in Film & Television Production. He is president of the board of directors of the New York Neo-futurists.

Streptococci: A Love Story was originally shot as a short video by writer-director Jeffrey Stanley while he was a graduate student in Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 1995 with the cast Kevin Draine and Jeanine Borchravenk. It was next produced as a stage play in 2004 by Eastcheap Rep at the Cherry Lane Annex as part of their evening of short plays, Jude Law is Not in These Plays, with cast Sally Jackson and Phil Easley, directed by Peter Chenot.