Notes From Underground
** Starring Writer/Performer Jonathan Ames **
May 1 - 25, 2003

Writer and performer Eric Bogosian will direct Notes from Underground at P.S. 122 beginning May 1st. The seventy minute solo play stars acclaimed writer/performer Jonathan Ames. Notes from Underground centers around "The Diarist", an unnamed urban recluse desperate to be normal but slowly sinking into madness and delusion. A tale told through a series of increasingly hallucinatory journal entries, Notes from Underground is an entertaining, darkly humorous and disturbing journey through the imagination of a man coming undone.

The production teams up Bogosian and Ames for the first time. Two of downtown's premiere authors and personalities, the pair met at a reading last year and the project was born. Although Bogosian himself performed the play during a sold out one-week run at P.S. 122 in 1994, he knew instantly that Ames would be the perfect person to play "The Diarist." Adapted from his 1993 novella, the play has no connection to the similiarly-titled Dostoyevksy novel; "I just steal titles I like," explains Bogosian.

In the last twenty years, Eric Bogosian has authored five full-length plays, six solos for himself, a full-length novel (Mall, from Simon & Schuster) and several novellas. He is the recipient of three Obies, a Drama Desk Award, and the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear Award. His best known plays, Talk Radio and subUrbia were turned into films, respectively. His solos include Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; and Drinking in America. His full-length plays include Griller, Humpty Dumpty and Red Angel. He has appeared in numerous TV shows and films as diverse as Dolores Claiborne to Under Siege and has worked with directors including Oliver Stone, Robert Altman, Atom Egoyan, Paul Schrader and Woody Allen.

Jonathan Ames is the author of the novels I Pass Like Night and The Extra Man, and two essay collections, What’s Not to Love? and My Less Than Secret Life. The Extra Man is being developed into a movie by Killer Films, with Isaac Mizrahi directing and Christopher Plummer attached as the lead. Ames is a winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a former columnist for New York Press. His first solo show of storytelling, Oedipussy, premiered at P.S. 122 in 1999. Ames is also a pugilist, having fought a real boxing match as "The Herring Wonder" in the performance art/boxing event Box Opera; Ames envisioned himself as a reincarnated Lower East Side Jewish boxer, thus his herring-inspired name. Ames, a New Jersey native, currently teaches at Columbia University and is at work on a new novel. The Village Voice has called Ames "a cross between Danny Kaye and Spalding Gray," and the Los Angeles Times has dubbed him "the reigning King of New York's performing writers."

Notes from Underground runs May 1 - 25, Wednesday-Saturday at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $15. P.S. 122 is located at 150 First Avenue at 9th St. (accessible from the #6 at Astor Place or the L at First Avenue). For reservations or more information, call 212-477-5288 or visit www.ps122.org.