Ruth Margraff (playwright) Ruth Margraff's most recent work includes NIGHT VISION: A NEW THIRD TO FIRST WORLD VAMPYRE OPERA written with composer/baritone saxophonist Fred Ho.  NIGHT VISION was commissioned by two Multi-Arts Project grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, and was awarded production funding from the Jerome Foundation, the NEA and NYSCA for its premiere at HERE Arts in February 2000 in New York.  Ruth also co-wrote ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINESE AMERICAÖA MARTIAL ARTS EPIC with Fred Ho for the following productions: JVC Jazz Festival/John Harms Center for the Arts - June 1999, Guggenheim Museum - December, 1999 and Septemeber 2000, Seattle Repertory Bagley Wright Theater - May 2001, Northeastern University Center for the Arts - August 2001 and the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 2001 Next Wave Festival - November 2001.  ONCE UPON A TIME will tour internationally in 2003. 

Ruth is a co-founder of HERE Theater's "Opera Project" where she wrote THE CRY PITCH CARROL, featured at the 1999 Village Voice Obie Awards.  An Austin production of CRY PITCH at Salvage Vanguard Theater was nominated for 7 Austin Critics Circle Awards and 4 B. Iden Payne Awards including "Outstanding Musical."  Salvage Vanguardís recent remounting of WALLPAPER PSALM was nominated for 8 Austin Critics Circle Awards. 

Ruth's other works include: THE ELEKTRA FUGUES, CENTAUR BATTLE OF SAN JACINTO, WALLPAPER PSALM, EXOTICA ORANGE, BACK OF THE DOLLAR LATIN, LOCKET ARIAS, GAT HIM TO HIS PLACE, ALL THOSE VIOLENT SWEATERS, FLAGS UNFURLED: 1976, WHEN THE PIE WAS OPEN, and VINYL PRESSINGS have been commisisoned, developed and produced by Joseph Papp's Public Theater, Cooper Union Grand Hall, Lincoln Center Outdoors and Bang-On-A-Can Festival, HERE Arts, the Kitchen, New York Theatre Workshop, the Guggenheim Museum, John Harms Center for the Arts, La Mama Galleria, Dance Theater Workshop, Hourglass/Gershwin Hotel, New Georges, GAle GAtes Company, Mabou Mines, Drama League, Poetry Project, Dixon Place@Vineyard, Mac Wellman Festival, Knitting Factory, Ohio Theater, Greenwich Street, Medicine Show, Brooklyn College, Columbia University, etc.  (New York); Red Eye, the Walker Art Center (Mpls); Nuyoricans/Theater Double (Philadelphia); University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa (Alabama); Undermain [1000 Dallas Leon Rabin Award nom. For "Best Musical"] (Dallas); Salvage Vanguard Theater [5 B. Iden Payne Award nom./16 Austin Critic Circle nom, "Top Ten Plays of 1997, 1999 and 2001/Austin Chronicle]; Deborah Hay Dance Company, Candy Factory/NERVE Dance Co., Fronterafest@Hyde Park, Yacov Sharir's Danceworks, Season 18 (Austin); Brown University (Providence); Iowa Playwrights' Workshop (Iowa City); Bottomís Dream [L.A. Weekly's "Pick of the Week"] and Audrey Skirball Kenis (Los Angeles); Film Studio (New Zealand); Aymakent/Istambul (Turkey); 2001 Beogradski Letnji Festival/Contess Ljubice Museum (Belgrade, Yugoslavia), etc. 

Ruth's work has been published in NuMuse Anthology (Brown), Epoch (Cornell), More Monologues For Women By Women (Heineman), Salvage Vanguard Press, Patterson Literary Review, the Mac Wellman Festival Journal, Conjunctions:28 "Music Theater Portfolio" (Bard), Downtown Brooklyn (LIU), EDGE New York, Autonomedia/Big Red Media a forthcoming article for Mac Wellman/BAM Dialogues/Theater in Crisis (St. Marks Press).  She is one of Paula Vogel's MFA playwrightís workshop graduates= from Brown University, a member of the playwrights' lab at the Public Theater and a NYTW Usual Suspect. 

Ruth has been the recipient of an artists' residency with composer Joshua Fried and Iraqui folklorist Dr. Sa'di Al-Hadithi at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy through the Foundazione Rockefeller to initiate DESERT SONGS in 1998 and was "artista in visita" at La MaMa's Umbria International in Spoleto, Italy.  She has been awarded a 1995-96 Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, a 1996-97 McKnight Advancement Grant, a 1998 NYSCA Individual Artist grant, an  ITI/TCG Travel Grant, a University of Texas Research Fellowship and an NEA/TCG 2000-01 playwriting residency at HERE Arts. 

Ruth most current work includes RED FROGS: A SLAPSTICK MIRROR FOR THE SUMMER PURGATORIO, an excerpt of which was presented in the 2000 Common Ground Festival/ASK in Los Angeles and will premiere with Hourglass Group at P.S. 122 in February 2002.  Ruth is currently writing and performing JUDGES 19: BLACK LUNG EXHALING for the 2001 Fronterafest (Austin), Undermain Theater (Dallas), HERE (New York) and Perishable (Providence) with composer/musician Nikos Brisco.  It toured this summer to Bosnia, Austria, Turkey and Greece.  She is also writing a new opera, HONORIA IN CIBERSPAZIO with composer/pianist George Oldziey and choreographer Yacov Sharir.  Ruthís upcoming new work will include writing a screenplay with martial arts choreographer Jose Figueroa and remounting WINE-BLUE-OPEN-WATER with GAle GAtes Company and director Michael Counts in New York in April 2002. 

Ruth has taught literature, literacy, creative writing and socio-political theory at St. Joseph's College and Long Island Universtiy in Fort Green and Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  She has been an assistant professor of Playwriting at the University of Texas at Austin and the Michener Center for Writers since 1999.  She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Playwriting at Brown University and is a national member of New Dramatists. 

Elyse Singer (Director/Artistic Director, Hourglass Group) directed the Hourglass Group's production of the first NYC revival of Mae West's play SEX Off-Broadway at the Gershwin Hotel and Deborah Swisher's Hundreds of Sisters & One BIG Brother at the Harold Clurman Theatre following runs at HERE, HBO Workspace in LA, and Brava in San Francisco.  In New York, she has worked extensively downtown, directing and producing the premieres of new plays by writers such as Ruth Margraff, Neena Beber, Naomi Iizuka, Brooke Berman, Catherine Zimdahl, Aaron Mack Schloff and Jeff Goode. As a writer/director:  Love in the Void (alt.fan.c-love), an adaptation of Courtney Love's Internet postings, performed by Carolyn Baeumler, which ran at HERE and P.S. 122 and has the distinction of being featured in 24 Hours in Cyberspace, the first Web site inducted into the Smithsonian. Other original works include Private Property (Edinburgh Festival) and Care-less: Eva Tanguay (Dixon Place).  Ms. Singer's newest play, Frequency Hopping, received a commissioning grant from the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan Foundation First Light Project 2000 and was further developed in August as part of the Drama League's 2001 New Directors/New Works Project in association with the EST/Sloan Project.  Prior to founding Hourglass Group, she produced a series of festivals for the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab that featured the work of more than 50 early career directors. A Yale graduate, Ms. Singer is a Usual Suspect and Convener at New York Theatre Workshop, an alumni of the '95 and '96 Lincoln Center Theater Directors Labs, an Affiliated Artist of New Georges and Artistic Director of the Hourglass Group. 

Erika Rundle (dramaturg) was most recently seen this past summer as Ellida in Waxfactory's Lady from the Sea at BAX. She also starred in So to Speak, which appeared at the New York Experimental Video Festival at Lincoln Center in 2000. She dramaturged  Hourglass Group's Frequency Hopping and Waxfactory's recent production of Heiner Müller's Quartet in New York. She has co-directed multimedia productions of Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belisa in the Garden at the Yale Cabaret and Megan Terry's Approaching Simone at Brown's Production Workshop. She is currently a teaching fellow at Yale College and the Associate Editor of Theater magazine. 

Kaye Voyce (costume designer) designed the costumes for the Hourglass production of Mae West's Sex as well as for Elyse Singer's Love in the Void and Care-Less: Eva Tanguay.  Other recent work includes True Love (Zipper), Powder Her Face  (Long Beach Opera), Mary Stuart (Court Theatre), Lady From the Sea (Intiman Theater), Cymbeline (California Shakespeare Festival), and A Midsummer Nightís Dream (Wolf Trap Opera). Her work has also been seen at the Public Theatre, the Roundabout, Playwrights Horizons, Womenís Project, The New Group, Steppenwolf, The Shakespeare Theatre, the Spoleto Festival, Williamstown Theater Festival, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Old Globe, The Juilliard School, and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. 

Juman Malouf (set designer) recently received her MFA in set and costume design from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.  She just returned from Dublin, Ireland, where she did set and costume design for The Christmas Show, a new piece created for the Fabulous Beast  Dance Company.  Previous work includes design for  Don't Blink directed by Erica Schmidt for the Directors Company. 

Traci Klainer (lighting designer) reecently designed FOUR at Manhattan Theatre Club and  DRAGAPELLA at Upstairs at Studio 54. Other New York credits include:  Wendy Wasserstein's ISN'T IT ROMANTIC at the Tribeca Playhouse; THE MINSTREL SHOW directed by Rob Urbanati; DARK LOVE at the Kitchen; Betty Buckley in Concert at Maxim's; THE FLATTED FIFTH produced by the New Group; ALIENS IN AMERICA at Second Stage; Kate Clinton's OUT IS IN; and THE SECRET MARRIAGE at The Manhattan School of Music. She has numerous regional credits including the Las Vegas production of ALWAYS...PATSY CLINE starring Sally Struthers at the Silverton Hotel and Casino. 

Laura Grace Brown (sound design) Recent credits include: Rude Entertainment,  The Book of Liz, Les Mizrahi, The Country Club;  (Drama Dept.); Light Years (Playwrights Horizons);  Aunt Vanya  (Chekhov Festival);  Talahassee (78th St.); Be Aggressive  (La Jolla Playhouse);  More Lies About Jerzy (Vineyard); Not Suitable  for  Children  (McCarter Theatre); How I Learned to Drive (Dallas Theater  Center); Stupid Kids, Dinah Was, Cyrano de Bergerac, Uncle Vanya.  Ms. Brown is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

Elaine J. McCarthy (projection designer) Broadway: Into the Woods, Judgement at Nuremberg, The Green Bird.  Off-Broadway: Speaking In Tongues, Underneath the Lintel, The It Girl, Boys Doní'tWear Lipstick, Goodbye My Friduchita, Don Byron's Tunes & ëToons (BAM).  Regional: Songs From the Tall Grass, Eleanor, Blue Man Group: Tubes (Chicago).  National Tours: Forgiveness (Chen Shi Zheng), Spirit.  Opera: Dead Man Walking, War and Peace (Kirov and Metropolitan Opera), Tan Dun's The Gate, Art Spiegelman's Drawn to Death, Peter Sellar's The Peony Pavilion.  Dance: Portraits of the Family (Cloud Gate), Remote (White Oak), Philip Glass and Susan Marshall's Les Enfants Terribles (IPA). 

Elise Hanley (stage manager) stage managed the workshop of Elyse Singer's Frequency Hopping for the Drama League.  Last season, she stage managed Mantle, Maris and Mom and Who's On First? at Castillo Theatre. Past performance credits include Hofstra University's annual Shakespeare Festival, A Midsummer Night's Dream at Adelphi University, and Durufle's Requiem at Carnegie Hall. 

CAST: 

Crystal Bock (Dolly Dallas) TV credits include: recurring roles as Patty on Dennis Leary's The Job (ABC), Sergeant Deakins' assistant on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and Timmy Miniver on Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson's The Beat.  Films: Smoke and Mirrors, For Richer or Poorer and Ellen Biddle Bites Back.  Some theatre credits include: Be Aggressive (GeVa Theatre), Sex Toys and Subway Stories (Nada) and Ivanov (The Ohio Theatre).  She has a B.F.A. from NYU and is originally from Las Vegas, Nevada.

Nina Hellman (Penny Shaw) THEATRE: The Eight (Adobe), The Communist Dracula Pageant (Soho Rep), Mae West's SEX (Hourglass), The Triple Happiness (Hourglass/NYTW), In Transit (Ubu Rep), Once In A Lifetime (Atlantic Theatre Co.), The Elephant Man (Synapse Prod.), Be Aggressive (GeVa Theatre), Sex a.k.a. Wieners and Boobs (Clubbed Thumb).  FILM: Wet Hot American Summer (USA Films), The Escape Artist (Either/Or Prod.), John Hamburg's Tick. TV: Mary Kay in "The Mary Kay Letourneau Story (upcoming, FOX). Nina is a "Civillian" and  founding member of the Hourglass Group. 

Nicole Lowrance (Shirley Goodness) NEW YORK: Measure for Measure in Central Park (dir. Mary Zimmerman, u/s Isabella), Maria in The Memorandum (dir. Will Pomerantz ), Madri/Sakuni in The Mahabharata and Gustchen in The Tutor (both directed by Ruben Polendo), Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (dir. by Eleanor Holdridge ). REGIONAL: Ophelia in Hamlet at The Shakespeare Theater in DC  (dir. Gale Edwards). TRAINING: The Juilliard School.

Molly Powell (Beatifica Strata) Recent credits include Denis Johnson's new play, Hellhound on My Trail at The Atlantic and Prospero in The Tempest at Opera House Arts in Deer Isle, Maine. Other favorites: Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project; The Summer in Gossensass and Springtime, both written and directed by Maria Irene Fornes; David Hancock's Deviant Craft; A Drop in the Ocean, created in collaboration with Ruth Maleczech at NYTW; Gordon Dahlquist's Vortex du Plaisir at Soho Ice Factory; and Wonder of the World, written and directed by David Lindsay-Abaire at DTW. Film: Bob Balaban's The Last Good Time and Jane Shepard's Nine. Molly is a graduate of Yale and UCSD. She received the 2001 Charles Bowden Award from New Dramatists.

Steven Rattazzi (The Shaggy Og) Recent: Helsinor by Todd Alcott; Switch by Rattazzi Bros. at the Ohio; The Unknown Guest by Olivier Cadiot for Lincoln Center.  Steven is a company member of the Obie award winning Target Margin Theater with which he has done: Dido; Five Hysterical Girls Theorem by Rinne Groff; The Seagull;  Strictly Dishonorable (Vineyard); Cymbeline; Six Scenes-A Barracks Brawl by Michael Brodsky; Objects Lie On A Table; Titus Andronicus. Other work: Richard Foreman's Samuel's Major Problems; the OBIE-winning production of Therese Raquin (d. David Esbjornson); The Alchemists at CSC (d. Barry Edelstein), Todd Alcott's I, Rasputin at PS122. With Spunky Productions: Waterbirds, A Pound of Flesh, The Merchant of Venice, King Lucky and Girl In The Ashes. With his brother James and Rattazzi Bros.: The Bottom; Innocent; More Tales of Bleeding Ruth. He will be appearing in Rinne Groff's Jimmy Carter Was A Democrat here at P.S.122 starting late March. 

Stacey Karen Robinson (Mabie Main) is a native New Yorker.  Regional theatre credits include: In the Blood, The America Play, Blood Pudding and UnMerciful Good Fortune.  She received her BA from Brown University and trained at the Juilliard School.  She is also a playwright.  Plays include: Wounded Heart, Deja and the January River and This Bright Flow.