Tuesday - Saturday    June 17 – 21    2008

8 PM      $20

THE RENO FOLLIES

RENO HOSTS AND PERFORMS WITH THE FOLLOWING LINEUP:

June 17

Holly Hughes, The Lucy Show (Lucy Sexton and Mike Ivey), Salley May

June 18

Brooke Johnson

June 19

Deb Margolin, Merri Milwe, Marian Fontana, Char Colavin

June 20

Brooke Johnson, Deb Margolin

June 21

Renita Martin

Noted comedic monologist Reno presents herself and some other well known screwballs, (friends), perforing new work for a week in June at Theaterlab. The writer/performers include Reno, Deb Margolin, Holly Hughes, Lucy Sexton + Mike Ivey, Renita Martin, Merri Milwe, Brooke Johnson, and Charlotte Colavin. Each night, a different lineup, with Reno every night.

RENO, “Comic Shaman” (Village Voice) is a comedic provocateur who started performing in the mid '80's at various dives in New York City’s East Village. She has performed Rebel Without A Pause, her critically acclaimed (“Insightful and Very, Very Funny.” NEW YORKER “The woman is consistently, energetically, loudly funny.” New York TIMES), Drama Desk Award nominated (Elaine Stritch won) personal/political rant show about the events of September 11th that opened October 4th, 2001 at LaMaMa ETC, over 700 times in the US and abroad.

Her first full length show, Reno in Rage and Rehab began at P.S. 122, moved Off-Broadway, was later adapted into an ACE Award nominated HBO comedy hour. Other full length shows done Off-B'way and toured extensively include Reno Once Removed and Citizen Reno. In 2001, her non-fiction sit-com, also called Citizen Reno premiered on Bravo TV. Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner exec-produced that as well as the film she made with Lydia Pilcher for HBO, Reno Finds Her Mom, co-starring Mary Tyler Moore and Lily. Reno was a Sundance Institute fellow for that project. Nancy Savoca’s performance film of Rebel Without A Pause received the 500 year old Florence (Italy) Peace Prize. She occasionally does cameos in other people's work – such as Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate and Bill Condon’s Kinsey.

Last month she tested the waters for her next project, Money Talks with Citizen Reno, with New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman. It went well, and she’s mounting a live pilot series starting at The Yard in Martha’s Vineyard this summer.   Her website is www.citizenreno.com.

DEB MARGOLIN is an American performance artist and playwright. Coming to prominence in the 1980's, as script-writer and performer in the feminist theater troupe Split Britches (of which she was a founding member), Margolin has since gone solo in a string of one-woman shows which she continues to perform. A compilation of her scripts, Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO, was published in 1999, edited by literary theorist Lynda Hart, who wrote commentary on each piece. Margolin was the recipient of a 1999-2000 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. In 2005, Margolin won the Kesselring Prize for her play, Three Seconds in the Key, a multi-character play which reflected her own experiences with Hodgkin's Disease. She currently teaches playwriting and performance as an associate professor at Yale University. Her most recent work and performance is entitled O Yes I Will, a detailed account of her experiences and insights on being under general anesthesia.

HOLLY HUGHES is an internationally acclaimed performance artist whose work maps the troubled fault lines of identity. Her combination of poetic imagery and political satire has earned her wide attention and placed her work at the center of America's culture wars. She is now a professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Art and Design

MERRI MILWE, a founding member of the socially progressive OFF WORLD THEATRE, works with playwrights developing and directing new works for the stage. She has worked extensively with is directing Deb Margolin's piece in this series, and

BROOKE JOHNSON, a Certified Advanced Funny Person since the early 60’s, was last seen in a mug shot on page 6, on Hope and Faith, Law and Order, and in her one woman show “Slightly Damaged”

RENITA MARTIN has been called a lot of things -- "brash and lyrical" (Boston Globe) and "crazy, sexy, cool" by those who know her well; she was last seen in "It Is the Seeing" at the Cherry Lane theatre in New York.

SALLEY MAY has been a NYC based performing artist since 1987, putting on shows, curating P.S.122's Avant-Garde-Arama series, and teaching theater workshops to mentally ill populations.

LUCY SEXTON/MIKE IVEY revive a minimal version of their popular satire of humiliation vehicles, “The Lucy Show” starring their alter egos, respectively, The Factress, and Vendetta "Baby Asparagus" K. Starr.

MARIAN FONTANA has been a writer and performer for the past 20 years. Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, elle, and others. Her memoir, A Widow's Walk was published in 2005 by Simon and Schuster, was on the New York Times best selling memoir list and was chosen as one of the Top Ten Great Reads of 2005 by People magazine. She is currently working on her second book Middle of the Bed which will be published by Simon and Schuster in May '09.