LEVITTOWN
Limited Engagement runs June 22 - July 16

"When Palmieri lets his imagination loose, the results can be evocative." -David Cote, Time Out

In a departure from presenting works developed in rehearsal and directed by Randy Sharp, Axis Company will premiere a new play LEVITTOWN by company member Marc Palmieri. Directed by George Demas (also a company member), previews begin June 22 at Axis Theatre with opening night slated for Monday, June 26.

In the shadow of World War II, architect William Levitt envisioned a new American town in a Long Island potato field. After an extensive and spirited development effort, thousands of Levitt "Cape Cod" homes were built with scrap materials. Each carefully modeled home was designed to serve the needs of the modern family. They were sold for $8,000 to battle-weary GIs with the hope of a new life-and as a means of forgetting recent trauma.

At the opening of LEVITTOWN, it is nearly half a century later. When Kevin, the grandson of a combat veteran, returns early from yet another college, he learns that his deeply troubled sister is about to be married. With renewed hope, he attempts to reconcile his family with the abusive father who left them years before. Amidst the thin walls of their Levittown home, the members of this beleaguered family are forced to confront a concealed history and the failure of the tidy truths they have desperately embraced.

The production stars Curzon Dobell (Julie Taymor’s Titus Andronicus), Brian Barnhart, Joe Fuer, Margo Passalaqua, Cecelia Riddett, Ian Tooley Michael Laurence (Book of Days at Signature Theater), and Joe Viviani with set & costumes by Kate Aronsson-Brown, lighting by Amy Harper and sound by Steve Fontaine.

Marc Palmieri was born in Elizabeth, N.J. in 1970 and later moved to Long Island. He attended Wake Forest University in North Carolina on an athletic scholarship after being drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1989 Major League Baseball amateur draft. Marc received an M.A. from City College of New York in 2004, where he received the Jerome Lowell DuJur Award in Creative Writing. In 1996 he wrote the screenplay for the film Telling You starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jennie Garth, distributed by Miramax. His plays Poor Fellas and Carl The Second are published by Dramatists Play Service and have been produced in New York, LA, Chicago and Houston, and broadcast on NPR from the Museum of Television and Radio. The West Coast premiere of Carl The Second was awarded a 2004 Kennedy Center Meritorious Award. Levittown was workshopped at the Rattlestick Playwrights' Theatre 2004 Exposure Festival, starring Dan Lauria (The Wonder Years) and An Inspired Comedy was granted an Area Award by Chashama in 2005. Marc currently lives in Astoria and coaches baseball at Chaminade High School on Long Island and works as an adjunct professor at Passaic County Community College in New Jersey.

For more than a decade, Axis Company has produced an eclectic series of original and published plays with highly advanced, state of the art technological components. Past productions include Buchner's Woyzeck, Beckett's Play, Benjamin Baker's 1848 sensation A Glance at New York and the U.S. premiere of Sarah Kane’s Crave, starring Deborah Harry. Their episodic play Hospital, about the interior life of a man in a coma, is a West Village phenomenon and their annual winter show Seven in One Blow, or The Brave Little Kid has been charming children and adults alike for the past four seasons.

LEVITTOWN runs June 22 - July 16, Thursday - Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 6pm. (Note: there is no performance June 25 and opening night is Monday, June 26 at 8pm). Axis Theatre is located at One Sheridan Square (just off 7th Avenue, accessible from the 1/9 train at Sheridan Square). Tickets are $18 for adults and $13 for seniors/students. For tickets call 212-352-3101 or visit AxisCompany.org.