January 7, 2008

From Gayfest’s recent newsletter:

We have decided to open this year’s Festival with David Brendan Hopes’ extraordinary play, EDWARD THE KING, originally presented in our Reading Series last May. We were all thrilled at the reception it received then and just knew that it was the perfect play to receive a full-scale production this year and be seen by many more of our devoted audience members. EDWARD THE KING neatly straddles the fourteenth and the twenty-first centuries, which manage to appear almost equally violent and inhospitable to love. Beset by the duties of his birth and dominated by a heroic father, Edward looks forward to a life of apparent conformity and desperate subterfuge, until he meets Piers Gaveston in a dirty alley. Then, it’s love and rebellion at first sight.

This remarkable play will be directed once again by Sidney J. Burgoyne, who comes to us from directing the epic musical RAGTIME at the White Plains Performing Arts Center. It is the ideal work to kick-off “the country’s premier festival of gay plays and a leading voice for the LGBT community.” The process of stepping-up from staged reading to full-scale production is, indeed, the whole thrust of GAYFEST NYC: to establish a year-round, not-for-profit play development organization that presents an annual showcase of those works most ready for production. We are a serious entertainment business developing new LGBT works for world stages, or film and television production, and we only produce works that we feel will live beyond the festival.

Only these things assure me it is a go.