Dear Desipina Members,
Welcome to Desipina's Season 6! We have lots to offer, including a free panel, discounts to various theater shows around town, as well as our own Desipina events, like the Seven.11 Call For Submissions and our Annual Volunteer Meeting! Details below.

Desipina & Company is now accepting applications to become part of a six-year-old theatre and film company dedicated to nurturing new voices. Producing artists, producers, technical crew, arts supporters, and all others are welcome! Come to our annual volunteer meeting to find out more and fill out an application!

This year's meeting will also have more information about Desipina's Co'Lab for producing artists as well as feature sample works from last year's Co'Lab members! Come join us for wine and cheese for this year's kick-off event!

Now entering its SIXTH year, the awarding- winning Seven.11 Convenience Theatre (2008) is now open for submissions!

Come be a part of the wildly popular, downtown NYC series, which takes seven, 11-minute plays, all set in a convenience store, and weaves them together to present an evening of entertaining quickies for all to enjoy.

Selected plays receive a full production in downtown NYC's theatre scene, scheduled for April 2008, and a modest, honorary stipend. Writers are also given the opportunity to participate in a team workshopping process. For further details on last year's production, visit: www.desipina.org .

Email submissions to: convenience@desipina.org

Or mail your play to:
Desipina & Co
520 8th Avenue, Suite 318
New York, NY 10018

All scripts must be 11 pages or less, in proper play format, with a max of three actors (role-doubling, however, is permitted) and set in a convenience store. No other requirement than to write something that challenges, defies, or just tells a darn good story. Each play should be able to stand alone; many of the plays from our previous Seven.11's have had independent productions around the country. Some themes from previous plays a futuristic race to claim the jewel of Ancient American bodegas, a young man tries to learn Kung Fu from a book to impress a girl, and two runaways end up in a 7-11 in search of road snacks. Don't wait, send your play now!

A Conversation with Rustom Bharucha and Members of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab

Join us as acclaimed writer, director, and cultural critic Rustom Bharucha along with playwrights from the Ma-Yi Writers Lab engage in an open discussion regarding race and ethnicity in theater and the role and relationship these topics play in Asian theater and Asian Pacific American theater.

Rustom Bharucha is an independent writer, director and cultural critic based in Calcutta, India. He is the author of several books including Theatre and the World, The Question of Faith, In the Name of the Secular, The Politics of Cultural Practice, and Rajasthan: An Oral History. His current project is an inter-Asian study of Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, within the larger contexts of nationalism, pan-Asianism, and cosmopolitanism.

There's never a dull moment in the Vonderly household. Led by a headstrong Jewish matriarch, this unconventional multi-ethnic family of adopted and disabled children band together after a crisis threatens to rip them apart. Bound by his wheelchair and burdened by family obligations, oldest brother Jerry Vonderly looks for ways to balance his mother's outlandish expectations and his own dreams of a "normal" life outside the family's anything-but-traditional home in Indianapolis, Indiana

A play by Lloyd Suh
Directed by Ralph B. Peña
Featuring Jackie Chung (Desipina Alumni), Lynn Cohen, William Jackson Harper, Stephen Jutras, Hoon Lee, Shawn Randall, Maureen Sebastian and Paco Tolson (Desipina Alumni).

For more info about the play, go to www.ma-yitheatre.org!

In a hot dry land, where life is nothing but diggin' and eatin' and prayin' and sleepin'...there lives a lad who's astonished by the arrival of his, uh...manhood

A new play by Maggie Smith
Directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde
A peculiar fable from the producers of GOD’S EAR and DEAD CITY!
With Paul Klementowicz, April Matthis, John McAdams, Barbara Pitts, Yves Rene, Christopher Ryan Richards

For more info about the play, go to www.newgeorges.org!