Kickstarter

In the Middle of our fundraising season and as we began our festival we found that a funding source that had been on board had to drop out and we are left with an unexpected shortfall as we go into our second and largest production of our production season.  

Our annual two play festival is presented FREE of CHARGE so we receive modest donations in the park but must rely on the funders who commit to us to bes ure our budget is complete.

We are trying to raise the funds to we have lost in order to STAY OUT OF DEBT!  This could be the first time the company has not ended a season with any loss and we need help to ensure that it doesn't happen this year which has been the most difficult financial year of our 11 year existence.  

Here's this year's pitch for the show:

Romance, love and deception abound in Airmid Theatre Company’s WORLD PReMIERE of A LITTLE BETRAYAL AMONG FRIENDS. This new translation brings  a Spanish Golden Age classic to life where SHAKESPEARE meets SEX AND THE CITY. Tickets are free. shows RUN Wednesday thru Saturdays at 7pm, Sundays at 3pm outdoors at Nissequogue River State Park in Kings Park from July 27 through August 14.  Don’t miss this FREE outdoor event!  Bring chairs or a blanket for seating.  FOR INFORMATION CALL 631-704-2888.  

Here's the information about the play: 

Amor. Lujuria. Sexo. It's what's on the minds of everyone in this 17th century comic romp. Three women all in love with the same man. One is his jilted fiancée. One is a toy for his pleasure. But the third… she is a free spirit in life and the art of love. Sex and the City has nothing on these upper class ladies who use all the tools at their disposal--love letters, disguises, late night assignations, and even carnal pleasures--to find and keep true love. 

This romantic comedy puts a twist on the traditional Don Juan legend.  In it we see how, even 400 years ago, women recognized their own sexuality and felt the tug of war between their own needs and the role they were expected to play in society. This piece can easily be seen as a theatrical precursor to the writings of women like Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Friedan, or to television and film works like Sex and the City.

Playwright Zayas is among the better known of her contemporaries but little is known about the life of this author and her writing.  Despite the lack of information, her writings, two novellas and poems, are often anthologized and studied today. 

ABOUT THE PLAY AND THE AUTHOR[i]

La traicion en la amistad, or The Betrayal of Friendship, by Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590–~1647).  Ms. y  Sotomayor is among the better known of her contemporaries but little is known about the life of this author and her writing.  Despite the lack of information, her prose writings are often anthologized and studied today.  She is known to have lived much of her life in Madrid, stayed for a 6-year period in her youth in Naples, Italy, and may have lived in Barcelona for an eight year period between writing her novelas.  She published poems in the period between 1621 and 1639, and 2 novelas, in 1637 and 1647 respectively. 

No exact publication date can be sited for this play, but historical references and critical comments place the play’s dates between 1628-1632.  Similar to the plays of other authors from Madrid of this period, we see the play set in various places like the Prado and the Duke of Lerma’s garden.  Also, like the plays of this period, we see the plot center around the peccadilloes of a braggart and seductor.  However, our seductor is a seductress, Fenisa and her pursuit of a man named Don Liseo.  The play is also unique in that Fensia holds herself out from the community of the other women in the play, and each male character pursues “his own interests in the play.”  Dramatic conventions like those used by Shakespeare and other writers of the period include nighttime rendezvous, exchanges of love notes, and the meetings of balconies to help tell the tale until the story chaos unravels and order is restored.

A Little Betrayal AMONG FRIENDS was the first commission of the Airmid Theatre’s translation workshop program in 2004 and reflects Airmid’s commitment to world literature and to working with living playwrights.  Through the translation project, Airmid recovers the best texts written by female playwrights from all nations and ages for study, translation, and ultimately, for production in English.  The first public reading of this new adaptation took place on December 11, 2006 and was made possible by the Open Meadows Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Grant administered by the Huntington Arts Council.