may the newsletter be with you
Last chance to see "If You're a Man at Night..." at The Tank
announcements
Dropping a little reminder here that all of our wonderful plays are available for licensing! If you are interested in producing one of these stellar works, you can apply for licensing here.
upcoming events
On Saturday, May 30th, 1319 will be tabling at Ruckus with books for sale from 1-10pm. Ruckus Theatre & Arts Festival runs from May 28th - 31st at Box of Moonlight in Bushwick, featuring new artists daily. You can buy individual tickets, day passes, or festival passes to see a whole heck of a lot of new art. See you there!!!
If You’re a Man at Night...You Gotta Be a Man in the Morning is running at The Tank til Saturday! Disgraced Olympic swimmer Ryan L*chte is dying of loneliness, trying to milk attention from his robot wife Deirdre, a Cyclops Michael Ph*lps, and terrifyingly/gorgeously…YOU! Can someone help this man?? The show runs until May 23rd. Get your tickets here.
new titles
Big shoutout to our April releases! Find new titles in the bookstore on our website.
Our Mother, Thou Aren’t in Heaven by Caitland Winsett
Or, An Astronaut Play by Johnny G. Lloyd
it’s been ten years since everyone died by Cesario Tirado-Ortiz
Elizabeth by Marissa Alaníz
The Body Electric by Grace Goble
Echo & Narcissus Blast Third Eye Blind Outside a Diner In New Jersey at 2AM by Brandon Monokian
Brickgirl by Ryan Stevens (Just closed a run at Brooklyn Art Haus with our partner org, Kitchen Sink Theatre Company.)
And please welcome our April acquisition, There Are No Diving Pools in Hell by Aliza Jane Cosgrove, which will be available in our bookstore shortly.
author spotlight
This month, we are spotlighting 1319 Press playwright, Di Lobontiu! Lobontiu is a Romanian American playwright, actor, educator, and administrator based in Brooklyn. Di holds a playwriting MFA from Brooklyn College and a BA from Wellesley College. They teach playwriting at NJIT and Brooklyn College. They are interested in exploring the intersections of masculinity, dominance + oppression, failure, and loneliness. Lobontiu was named a 2024 MacDowell Fellow, a 2023 Jane Hoppen Resident with Paragraph Workspace for Writers, and received the 2023 Puffin Grant for My Cousin Nelu Is Not Gay. Recent writing includes My Cousin Nelu Is Not Gay (The Brick Theater 2023, Ars Nova’s ANT Fest 2022), Rentabutch (Bushwick Starr Reading Series Finalist 2023), and If You’re A Man At Night…You Gotta Be A Man In The Morning (The Brick Theater 2024, The Workshop Theatre 2023). Di has performed their solo show Sfânta: Hell Bent on Heaven, about a teenage wannabe Russian Orthodox saint, at the Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Kalamazoo, Oregon, and Orlando Fringe Festivals.
Lobontiu’s work strives to invite everyone to the party without diluting any hard truths. “My work doesn’t package identity, but refracts it, complicates it… gives characters the dignity of an explosive, compelling existence. It resonates with the big: surrealism, clowning, gender fuckery…and the small: the sharpness of a single well-placed word, the sentence that has never been spoken before, the tiny gesture that breaks the play open. Not unimportantly, I want to make people laugh.”
Di became involved with 1319 Press when they stumbled across our instagram around the time of its inception, before any authors were attached. Their play, My Cousin Nelu Is Not Gay, had had limited self produced runs in NYC and Di was searching for the piece’s next steps. They applied to the open call and got published! “As the more established (i.e. moneyed) theater institutions fight over scraps in terms of production and publication of new works, this felt like such a generous opportunity for younger artists to have a life for their plays outside of those tired systems.”
Lobontiu’s play If You’re a Man at Night...You Gotta Be a Man in the Mornings is currently running at The Tank until May 23rd! The piece was originally inspired by a video online called Ryan Lochte Makes News Anchor Cry! To be clear, the anchor is crying from laughing so hard. In the video, “Lochte is held up as this paragon of manliness—he has an eight pack and everyone loves him and all the ladies fawn over him. But he’s so dumb, and so heartwarmingly dumb, that the news anchor can’t help but laugh herself to tears once he’s off camera. It was this bizarre mix of traits, his excellence paired with his helplessness, that I found so juicy.”
Audiences have been LOVING the show. There are opportunities to do shots from a bottle of cognac Di brings onstage and audiences have drunk the entire handle across three performances, if that says anything... The play is a mix of absurdly huge humor rooted in small, specific sadness that resonates across audiences. And we want more of you there to witness it... SO GET YOUR TICKETS!!
What’s a play you love? Or a playwright that inspires you?
Is God Is by Aleshea Harris is a perfect play -- cannot WAIT to see the movie. I also looove Plano by Will Arbery, I love María Irene Fornés, I love Natalie Palamides’s clown work in Nate: A One Man Show, I loved Tim Robinson before he went all HBO... I love comedy & a little surrealism smashed up against gut-wrenching tragedy, I guess!
Tell us something weird about you — a quirky fact perhaps...
I grew up in Alaska, I’m an identical twin, I’m an Aries (and deeply identify) I can name every chemical element...the list goes on...
That’s all for this newsletter. See you back in your inbox in a month! Happy reading.