Downtown Urban Theater Festival at Cherry Lane Theatre

The Downtown Urban Theater Festival (DUTF) is back for its sixth season at the Cherry Lane Theatre from 18 - 29 Jun 2008.

This year�s festival features 12 productions from a diverse collection of new and emerging playwrights on topics ranging from songstress Billie Holiday to the 1985 fire on Osage Avenue in Philadelphia and the death of a gay Mormon to women soldiers in Iraq.

The DUTF performance schedule:

• Osage Avenue
  Playwright: Jamal Williams
  Synopsis: This drama recreates the 1985 bombing in Philadelphia that shocked the world! Can a 'burnt' city be revitalized after turmoil, racial divide and police brutality?
  Date: Wed 18 Jun 2008.
  
• The Mummy and the Bodhisattva
  Playwright: Jai Chun and Mike Cipra
  Synopsis: A Buddhist Bar-Napkin Poet Laureate rekindling a relationship with his wildly creative, trash-artist wife explores how human beings express love while the home they have built together burns down around them.
  Date: Thu 19 Jun 2008.
  
• Missa Solemnis or The Play About Henry
  Playwright: Roman Feeser
  Synopsis: An the morning of February 25, 2000, a young Mormon man named Henry Stuart Matis drove to the LDS Ward House in Los Altos, California, placed a gun to his head and ended his life. Why?
  Date: Fri 20 Jun 2008.
  
• On The Rocks
  Playwright: Dina Laura and Mina Radhakrishnan
  Synopsis: Sometimes laughter is the best medicine. This story explores the humor of heartache and the quest for love and self-understanding as seen through the lives of two friends and two strangers.
  Date: Sat 21 Jun 2008.
  
• (Double Bill)
  Honor & Fidelity
  Playwright: Tanya Perez
  Synopsis: Almost missing the plane to San Juan, one woman's story unravels a lot more than an upgrade to a window seat in this musical journey across generations of forgotten history.

  Ballad of Sad Young Men
  Playwright: Jerome Augustus Parker
  Synopsis: Joe, a soldier without direction, revisits a childhood haunt on the eve of his return to war. On the verge of Joe�s personal destruction, his childhood friends do the best they can to save his life before he�s shipped off to combat.
  Date: Tue 24 2008.

  
  
• Couple of The Century
  Playwright: William Fowkes
  Synopsis: Looking for love, marriage and therapy on Central Park West? When old friends don�t help matters any, what happens when people can�t even discuss what�s wrong with their relationship?
  Date: Wed 25 Jun 2008.
  
• (Double Bill)
  W.A.C. Iraq
  Playwright: Mel Nieves
  Synopsis: Mothers, daughters, sisters, and soldiers their voices filled with loss, confusion, loneliness, anger and sometimes hope, try to make sense of the ever changing world around them during a questionable time of war.

  His Train is Bound For Glory
  Playwright: Ione Lloyd
  Synopsis: The dark chocolate dreams of a white woman and her love affair with a black man are unveiled. Sex, love, chocolate, betrayal, war and racism do not a happy marriage make.
  Date: Thu 26 2008.

  
  
• (Double Bill)
  Manchild Machismo
  Playwright: A. B. Lugo
  Synopsis: Explores Tito's search for masculinity and what it means to be Latino through unlikely sources�the men in his family.

  El Building
  Playwright: Jane Lippman
  Synopsis: Bitchy, over-therapized, self-centered�pretty standard population for a gentrified apartment building�so busy bickering and whining, they don't even notice their own impending ruin.
  Date: Fri 27 2008.

  
  
• Billie�s Blues
  Playwright: Hershell Norwood
  Synopsis: About a woman�s struggle against a world that is controlled by men. A young Billie Holiday suffers usury and physical abuse to survive. Undergoing transformation, she realizes the value of her own life and art.
  Date: Sat 28 Jun 2008.