Conceived by Provvidenza and Molly Prather
Performed by Provvidenza
Directed by Molly Prather

Provvidenza Catalano (Enza/they/them) is a community motivator, teacher and performance artist working in Los Angeles. Enza uses live performance, local events and creative pedagogies to experiment with community building techniques, applied queerness and radical love. They organize with Them Fatale, LA’s longest running community drag show, who over the course of 6 years have raised close to $40,000 for local queer and trans mutual aid projects. As an actor, you may have seen them in your favorite teen drama as the local trans pastor or the quirky gay waiter in a recent SXSW indie. They are also the long-time host of RuPaul’s DragCon in Los Angeles, New York City and London. On stage, Provvidenza has performed at The Hammer Museum, The Getty and numerous other theatres and universities across the US. Most recently debuting their new performance work Butch Visions at One Institute’s inaugural Circa Festival.Their written work has appeared in The Advocate and Fat & Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives. Enza is currently pursuing a MFA in Performance Pedagogy at Loyola Marymount University building upon over 15 years of organizing and performance work.

75-90 minutes, no intermission

Co-Presented with Coeurage Ensemble

Coeurage Ensemble is excited to join Los Angeles LGBT Center for two nights of dance, drag, music and art! 

Join us on November 15th for Release It: Brave New World. It will be a night of collaboration. As part of our mission to make space for new work and emerging artists, Release It invites audiences to a brave space of dance, music, and visual art. We’ll explore what it means to release what most needs to be brought into the light. Come together to celebrate, support one another, and honor our collective humanity in a wild/scary/exhausting time. 

Creative Producer: Tiffany Adeline Cole

Cast:

Tiffany Adeline Cole

Chayllce Brogdon

Paige Frappier

Alexandria Rossi

Clinton Roane

Gerry Tonella

Anthony Ji-Ahnte Sibert

Kelly Perez

Frazier Perez-Yadon

Frank Halbiger + Ensemble

Maura Mannle + Ensemble

Tia Janeine

Cici Harding

Gina Kelly

Then on December 19th, you can experience Santa’s Sack: A Raunchy Holiday Revue. What’s Santa hiding in his sack? What’s Mrs. Claus packing in her tool belt? Carol of the Bells? More like Cate Blanchett’s bells. Let’s put the Ho Ho Ho in Homoerotic because I want a hippobottomus for Christmas.  A holiday show for homos, sapphos, freaks, geeks, gender benders, and babes. One night. Many feelings. 

Curated by Charmin Ultra

Bios:

Tiffany Adeline Cole, Creative Producer: ”Release It…”.

An artist with a passion for the theatrical, Tiffany has a background in Dance, Acting, and Event Planning. After beginning her professional career with Rock of Ages in Las Vegas, Tiffany spent the next four years performing in Musical Theater across the country, including making her Broadway Debut in Escape To Margaritaville. Since relocating back to Los Angeles, she has co-owned her own event planning company, accepted a position with Broadway Inspirational Voices, and become a member of Coeurage Ensemble. Tiffany is thrilled to bring audiences “Release It: Brave New Works”, co-presented by Coeurage Ensemble and Los Angeles LGBT Center.

Coeurage Ensemble:

Coeurage was founded in the fall of 2009, when 12 graduates from California State University, Fullerton met in the back of a pie shop to form a theatre company. Our philosophy was simple: the cost of a ticket should never prevent anyone from seeing high quality theatre in Los Angeles. With our Pay What You Want ticketing model in place, we produced our first piece in early 2010, an original series of monologues written for an all female cast titled “Head Over Heels.” The late Steve Julian attended and wrote a widely shared article with the headline, “Six people see Head over Heels, millions show no Coeurage.” The writeup, which lauded our work while lamenting small LA theatre houses, helped put us on the map, and our attendance rose to a rare level of consistency amongst LA’s intimate theatre scene.

We would have never conceived that the work we originally produced out of garages and now- condemned buildings could ultimately lead us to acclaim in American Theatre Magazine and a slot in the mainstage season at Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre, where Coeurage was awarded the inaugural production of their Block Party program. 

During the pandemic we were forced to pivot and create art in a different way. The Nomad Project was launched!  The ongoing project currently has ten different stories based at specific coordinates around Los Angeles, using existing locations as inspiration for fully produced aural journeys. Audiences can experience them in-person, on-the-go, or from the comfort of home. You can listen here: https://www.coeurage.org/nomad-project

Our 2023 production of Frozen Fluid by Fly Jamerson, co-produced with the Los Angeles LGBT Center, was cast entirely with actors who identify as trans or nonbinary. Our partnership with The Los Angeles LGBT Center for this production allowed us to engage directly with the Center’s extensive queer and trans community, expanding our Coeurage community and offering greater access to live theater with our Pay What You Want ticket model. We were able to tell a story that had not yet been told in Los Angeles, where stories of the trans, nonbinary experience tend to be grounded in Realism. By presenting Fly’s poetry-driven script, we reached folks in a heartspace. We are incredibly proud of the impact the piece had on our audiences. One (cis-gender male) reviewer wrote, “I’m grateful to Coeurage Ensemble and the Los Angeles LGBT Center for putting this play on. What’s the point of going to the theater if all it does is affirm our values rather than challenge them? To its profound credit, there’s nothing pedantic about this play, and even less so about this playful production. The production is an earnest attempt to figure something out, a noble impulse, and, for this audience member, it offered an invite to do the same.”

Run Time: 

Release It: Brave New World, the run time is 90 minutes including a 15 minute intermission.

Santa’s Sack: A Raunchy Holiday Revue, the run time is 75 minutes with no intermission

Conceived, Written, and Performed by Paul Outlaw and Joe Seely

Two multidisciplinary performing artists share and deconstruct the process of creating their current work-in-development, a devised performance piece about boys and men—Black, white, straight, queer.

Paul Outlaw is a Los Angeles and Berlin-based multidisciplinary performing artist. Spanning an array of mediums including text-based drama, physical theater, performance art, spoken word and American popular music, his works confront the tangled web of societal constructs around race and gender and excavate the enduring legacies of white supremacy and patriarchal violence—both physical and psychological—that have marred the tapestry of Euro-American history. Paul has created an evolving series of performances under the banner of OutlawPlay; his solo theater works and numerous collaborations have been presented in the United States (including at LACMA, MOCA, REDCAT, the Getty, The Lab, Yale Union) and abroad (including at Maxim Gorki Theater/Berlin, Melkweg/Amsterdam and GES-2/V-A-C Foundation/Moscow). Paul is the recipient of various grants, fellowships and residencies, including a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship and a Los Angeles County Performing Arts Recovery Grant. He played the title role in Pepe Danquart’s SCHWARZFAHRER, winner of the 1994 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. Paul is one of the queer changemakers memorialized in One Institute’s 2021 exhibition, PRIDE PUBLICS: WORDS AND ACTIONS. outlawplay.com

Joe Seely is a Los Angeles-based performer and self-taught maker of theatrical objects, who has been creating effigies since the age of four. Before he could even read, Joe discovered puppets as objects through the rod puppet illustrations of German master puppeteer Hansjürgen Fettig. The central themes of Joe’s art are the American identity and the ways in which violence, both towards ourselves and others, has reduced our ability to value what exists outside our constructed identities. His experiences in and out of costume have led him to recognize that what we use to signify who we are is similar in construction to puppets and masks. Joe’s designs have won multiple awards from the LA Stage Alliance (Ovation Award), LA Critics Circle and LA Weekly. Joe has collaborated on projects with major art institutions in the region (LACMA, MOCA, LA Opera, Mark Taper Forum, among others) and with artists such as Asher Hartman, Nao Bustamante, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Johanna Went and Paul Outlaw. Joe has toured throughout the West Coast, and internationally with Zoo District (Ivan Franko Theater/Kyiv) and Emily Mast (Power Plant/Toronto). joeseely.com

Run time: 60 minutes, no intermission

Written and Performed by Laural Meade
Directed by Michael Schlitt
With Gregory Nabours, Piano
Styling by Daniel Salon

Laural Meade‘s (she/her) live theater creations explore titillating figures from early 20th century American history and have been seen in venues near and far, from L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum to Chicago’s Bailiwick to Speeltheater in Edam, Holland. Laural writes and directs – and often takes over the mic, delivering a special brand of torchy-jazz-pop. She has kicked up her heels while singing material both sacred and profane at Largo at the Coronet, The Bootleg, Fais Do-do, Getty Villa, The Mint and the Los Angeles Theater Center. The historic Gardenia Supper Club recently featured her in a year-long performance residency, belting out the saucy songs and stories of jazz great Sophie Tucker. When she’s not telling Tucker’s dirty jokes, you can find her in a professorial role at Occidental College – goading young theater artists to be louder, faster and funnier.

Gregory Nabours (he/him) lives and works in Los Angeles as a composer/lyricist and music director. His life in music has forayed into classical piano, jazz, film scoring, and choral music, with a focus on musical theater. He is the Resident Composer and a founding member of Coeurage Theatre Company. As a music director, Gregory’s work on the intimate theater production of The Color Purple earned him an Ovation Award, the LA Drama Critics Circle Award, the LA Weekly Award, and the NAACP Award for Best Musical Direction. Other credits include In the Heights, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Falsettos, Rent, The Wild Party, A New Brain, Spring Awakening, Into the Woods, Assassins, and The Full Monty. Current projects include music directing the immensely popular bi-monthly (Mostly) Musicals cabaret, in local appearances at The Write-Off Room, The Rockwell, Vitello’s and The Federal.

Run time: 1 hour 15 minutes, no intermission

Written and Performed by Josiah Blount
Directed by David Bridel
Associate Directed & Sound Designed by Taubert Nadalini
Voice of God: Lake Bell
Choreographed by Taylor Sieve

Josiah Blount (he/him) is an LA-based actor and writer. Film credits include Ted 2 (Universal), and The Gambler (Paramount). TV credits include Modern Family (ABC), The Mentalist (CBS), Suburgatory (ABC), and Happyland (MTV). As a writer, his pilot script Abomination was a quarterfinalist in the 2023 Screencraft TV Pilot Script Competition. He was recently invited to the Sunday Company at The Groundlings and will begin performing there in the coming months. He is a graduate of The Clown School and performs throughout Los Angeles. His solo show Flayed won the Soaring Solo Social Impact Award 2023, Best of Broadwater 2023, and the Best of Solofest 2024 award. 

Run time: 1 hour 15 minutes, no intermission

Written by Tony Abatemarco
Directed by Chuma Gault

Nov 23 – “Jefferson/Thea”

Dec 12 – “Horatio Street”

TONY ABATEMARCO  – Playwright/ LALGBT Center Artist-in-Residence

Active in LA for over forty-six years as actor, director, writer, and/or producer, Tony has worked at dozens of intimate theatres, as well as South Coast Rep, the Mark Taper Forum, Taper, Too, the Kirk Douglas, Geffen Playhouse, Pasadena Playhouse, I.C.T. Long Beach, the Alex, A Noise Within, LA/ Long Beach/ San Luis Obispo Opera companies, and Reprise.  In New York at the Public, LaMama, the Cherry Lane, Theatre of the Open Eye, as well as Broadway’s Music Hall where he directed “Lucifer’s Child” starring Julie Harris.  Statewide he’s worked at Pittsburgh Public, the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, the Folger, Williamstown (two seasons), the Harvard Loeb, Boston’s Colonial, Santa Fe Rep (four seasons), Lexington Opera House, etc. His four produced plays, “ACTION/ITEMS, The Collected Plays of Tony Abatemarco” are published by F-Stop Books and available at Amazon, including his two full-length plays, BEAUTIFIED (2012) and FOREVER HOUSE (2016), which received their world premieres at Skylight Theatre where he served as Co-Artistic Director from 2011 to `22. Internationally, he has performed in Delphi, Greece, at the ICA in London, directed “Catwalk Confidential” at the Edinburgh Fringe and at the Arts Theatre in the West End, directed Eric Overmyer’s “On The Verge” at Teatre Grevin in Paris in both English & French.  His feature film and tv work is extensive, with well over seventy roles shot in the U.S., Canada, and South Korea. He is the recipient of over twenty-five Los Angeles theatre awards and nominations by The L.A. Theatre Critics’ Circle, Ovation Awards, LA Weekly (LAWEE), DramaLogue, Garland, Broadway World, & Stage Scenies in writing, acting, directing, and producing, as well as two NEA Fellowships, the first George Stevens’ Observership sponsored by SDC and the Directors’ Guild, and the first Ted Schmitt Memorial Award for “Innovation in Small Theatre” sponsored by Theatre LA. He is currently curating “Thresholds of Invention” at the Odyssey Theatre. This autumn, he is thrilled to fulfill a three-month Artist Residency here at the LGBT Center, developing his “Lost & Found Trilogy”.  Thank you Jonathan Munoz-Proulx, Zach Davidson, and Matt Richter!

CHUMA GAULT – Director

Chuma is an actor, producer and director based in Los Angeles. 2023 was a year in development with playwrights J. Kwang Lee through EST/LA and Dave Trudell through The Odyssey. In 2022 he directed August Wilson’s, GEM OF THE OCEAN at the University of Georgia. Pre-pandemic, Chuma played Caesar in “Gem of the Ocean” (A Noise Within) which won Best Production (LA Drama Critics 2019) and associate produced, wrote and directed for the William Inge Theatre Festival. He directed on the multi-award winning web-series “In Search of A-P-I-G”. Acting awards: Los Angeles Stage Raw Awards (outstanding solo performance) nominee for “The Gun Show” by EM Lewis (Moving Arts); LA WEEKLY Awards (Best Male Performance) nominee for “Freedom Summer” by Stephen Sachs (Fountain Theater), (Best Male Performance) for “Tree” by Julie Hébert (Ensemble Studio Theatre – Los Angeles -LA Drama Critics Circle nomination for Best Male Performance). Chuma was a recurring guest star on “Girlfriends” (Amazon) recently guest starred on The Rookie, was a regular in the drama “Game of Silence” (NBC) and a notorious five ep. arc on DAYS OF OUR LIVES.  Most recently, he directed Marlow Wyatt’s “ROBBIN, FROM THE HOOD”, currently running at the Road Theatre in No. Hollywood.

JOHN FREELAND, Jr  – Production Stage Manager

Productions include Until, Until, Until … (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago). October 7: In Their Own Words (Hillel UCLA), The Leimert Park Jazz Festival, Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival 30th Anniversary. Under the Skin, Closely Related Keys (International City Theatre). Shanghai Sonatas: A New Musical in Concert, Le Dernier Sorcier: The Last Sorcerer 1867 (Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts). JazzAntiqua Dance & Music Ensemble. Europe: Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Scotland), International Theatre Festival of the Blind and Visually Impaired (Croatia). John is a board member of The Unusual Suspects Theatre Company  https://theunusualsuspects.org. He attended Wesleyan University in his hometown of Middletown, CT.

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

PAULA HOLT, GARY GROSSMAN, JEANNE FIELD, MARY GAIL ARTZ, GUILLERMO PEREZ, DAN McCLEARY & Art Division, JONATHAN, ZACH, MATT here at the Center, and the slew of actors, directors, and consultants who have helped “push the rock up the hill”. But most of all, to

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, who conjured the mountain that is “Streetcar”-  Abundant gratitude.

By Brian Sonia-Wallace
Directed by Linda Ravenswood

Brian Sonia-Wallace (he/they) creates immersive poetry experiences internationally. He is the creator of RENT Poet and Pride Poets, and co-founder of the West Hollywood Slam Team. Brian was the 4th Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, and has been a poet-in-residence for Amtrak, Mall of America, and the National Parks. He is the author of The Poetry of Strangers (Harper Collins) and his work has been published in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and American Poets. He teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Run time: 60 minutes, no intermission