Photo by Daniel Talbott

This Thursday at 6pm, midtown’s Drama Book Shop will host a reading and book signing of Cino Nights: Plays from Rising Phoenix Rep, in honor of the publication of the first anthology of plays performed over the course of the last two years at Jimmy’s No. 43 in the East Village. The event, like all of the performances which it celebrates, is free and open to the public.

Cino Nights hearkens back to an era roughly half a century ago, when Off-Off-Broadway pioneers like John Guare, Robert Patrick, Lanford Wilson, William M. Hoffman, and Doric Wilson – the movement’s namesake – formed a collective that wrote, performed and produced no-frills theatre at the Caffe Cino. Cino Nights, founded by Rising Phoenix Repertory artistic director Daniel Talbott, honors that original scene by congregating an equally passionate group of creative types to write inventive, emotionally raw site-specific work for the Jimmy’s venue. All shows received only a week of rehearsal and then played for one night.

The current collection includes new plays by such vital New York writers as Mando Alvarado, Courtney Baron, Emily DeVoti, Jessica Dickey, Kristen Palmer, Gary Sunshine, Adam Szymkowicz, and Lucy Thurber; there will be readings from DeVoti’s, Palmer’s, Sunshine’s and Thurber’s plays. (The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. has published the work, which also includes a foreword by New Dramatists artistic director Todd London.)

At $19, this book is a steal. Having attended the majority of these Cino Nights performances, I can attest that as an artifact, this anthology is invaluable. These shows have been lightning in a bottle, featuring work by some of the finest and fiercest talent to be found in New York. Each performance has been a privilege to attend, and it’s safe to say that the actors share that sentiment with the audience. Performers have included Seth Numrich (of the Tony-sweeping War Horse) and (The Green Lantern, Rabbit Hole). Though the space is small and usually hot, and sometimes the odd insect or rodent can be spotted, Cino Nights is in many ways an oasis for all those called to the arts, a way of restoring the creative soul and working in a collaborative fashion uninfected by budgetary concerns or corporate stifling. Everyone works for free, doing it for love of the craft.

I hope there are more editions where Cino Nights came from, as there have been additional plays by exceedingly talented playwrights that should be preserved. But in the meantime, it’s thrilling to have this first book available. In honoring the past, Cino Nights has given a great present to modern indie theatre.

Cino Nights can also be purchased at http://www.amazon.com/Cino-Nights-Mano-Alvarado/dp/0979485266/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340723793&sr=8-1&keywords=cino+nights

La MaMa Experimental Theater Club and its founder, the marvelous, mercurial Ellen Stewart—well, if you know them, they need no introduction. It’s like saying “Thomas Edison” and “electricity.” But if you don’t, here are the Cliff’s Notes.

Stewart was a hopeful African-American fashion design student who came from Chicago to New York City in the early ’60s to follow her dreams. Upon arrival she found she had no scholarship and found a job as a porter at Saks Fifth Avenue to make ends meet. On weekends she would go to Orchard Street and buy snippets of fabric to made incredible concoctions, which she wore under her blue smock as she wheeled carts around Saks.

One day, on her way to lunch wearing a “Miss Ellen Creation” a shopper stopped her to inquire where she had bought the dress. When told it was her own design, the shopper, incensed at Stewart’s uppity-ness, took her to management. Management saw the diamond in the rough and gave her a line of dresses called, you got it, Miss Ellen.

A joyous Stewart in the 1970s.

Stewart had friends writing plays—her stepbrother among them—and attempting to make it in the theater. To help them out, exactly 50 years ago this week, Stewart had the prescience to rent a small space on Second Avenue and begin the La MaMa Theater. Any time Stewart attended a performance, she would ring a tinkling bell and croon in a voice tinged with Creole honey, “Welcome to La MaMa, dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theater.” Last year alone the space saw 60 different showings of dance, theater, music, multimedia and everything in between from Downtown and around the world.

Stewart died this January past the age of 90, and there have been many obits, tributes and dedications to her, but none were as personal, uproarious and full of wonder as last night in the theater she called the Annex, now dubbed the Ellen Stewart Theater on her beloved East Fourth Street. Mayor Michael Bloomberg even lionized Stewart and renamed the block Ellen Stewart Way, promising million of dollars to help renovate the wonderful old theater. Actors Bill Irwin, Harvey Keitel, Diane Lane and Estelle Parsons were there. Parsons said, “Where would the bright lights of the theater be without her? Performers, musicians, composers, everything—there’s no place like it on earth.”

La MaMa spawned hybrid performance before anyone had thought of it. Stewart combined poets, choreographers, writers, musicians, composers and visual artists and let them all find their way to create boundary-breaking art. Composers Philip Glass, Meredith Monk and Elizabeth Swados all got their start at La MaMa, and last night Swados premiered her new La MaMa Cantata, which will bow in its entirety Nov. 7, Stewart’s birthday.

Wallace Shawn performed an excerpt of his Hotel Play and Amiri Baraka, whose early work as Leroy Jones was seen on La MaMa’s tiny stages, read a poem. He later told me, “Ellen was a very courageous pioneer in the wilderness of crazy, white America.”

The Annex was filled with tables and revelers kept switching chairs and wandering during performance breaks to visit those Stewart would have called her babies. One long-time La MaMa baby, director Paul Zimet of the Talking Band, told me, “I am seeing people I haven’t seen in years—the creative output of all of us in this room is so extra ordinary.” As he said this, director Ping Chong stopped by, followed by Dario D’Ambrosi, who had flown in from Italy. D’ambrosi began his career with Stewart in 1979 on a chance meeting.

One of the purposes of the evening, other than honoring Stewart and raising funds, was to award the first Ellen Stewart Theater award. Honoree Sam Shepard could not be there. His agent, Judy Boles explained, “Sam had to be on a film set unexpectedly in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Sam doesn’t fly so it takes time, but he sent this video.” In the video, the perennially handsome over-60-year-old declared his affection for Stewart. “I was told there was this woman with a theater Downtown and I had a script and I took it to her. She was gorgeous and she took the script and my hand and said, ‘Baby, we are going to do your play.’ She never read it and yes, we did it and many more.”

Stewart was famous for her instincts about people and projects. The story Shepard told is no different than any of the thousands told by others or witnessed by me during my tenure as the theater’s executive director during the ’80s and ’90s. Stewart would hold court for writers or directors to come to her, when she would let her “beeps”—what she called her instincts—go off. She said, “Baby, if it beeps to me, MaMa will do it. If it doesn’t, well then, no.”

Stewart’s beeps launched the careers of Peter Brook, Andrei Serban, Robert Wilson, Paul Foster, Jean Claude Van Italie, Lanford Wilson, Adrienne Kennedy, Wilford Leach, John Kelly, Al Pacino, Bette Midler, Joe Chaikin, Harvey Fierstein, Robert De Niro. As the seasons, unfold there will be more new stars in the La MaMa firmament—just wait and watch.

Top Photo: The late Ellen Stewart, founded of LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club. Photos courtesy of LaMama Experimental Theater Club.

That may be putting the plot too baldly. Wilson and his narrator Alan’s play is too supple and slippery to be reduced to a synopsis. As the characters of Lemon Sky fight for their rights (and Alan’s memories battle for supremacy—to hell with chronology), what could have been a rehashing of old wounds turns into a gorgeous, generous examination of redemption—particularly the redemption that we grant ourselves.

Nobbs is heart-stoppingly good as Alan, who is coyly fey as his 1970s incarnation and admirably charming as his younger self. He knows the score and he knows the ending, but he can’t help but fall in love again with who he thought his family was in the retelling. As he conjures them, we witness both their surface appeal and the desperation and betrayal festering just below the surface. His father’s “hobby” of photographing young women in bikinis is both innocent and disturbing; his stepmother’s insistence on being both the hip parent and the perfect subservient wife is understandable and appalling.

Director Jonathan Silverstein has an uncanny affinity for Wilson’s men and women. Nowhere is found an easy, obvious performance. Even Alan’s two foster sisters, pill-popping nymphomaniac Carol (Alyssa May Gold) and sweetly dopey Penny (Amie Tedesco) are given a depth and inner misery that belie their facile quips.

But it’s in Silverstein’s handling of the meta-theatrics of Lemon Sky that this revival becomes a must-see event. Alan is still haunted by Doug and Ronnie, both the perfect couple he wished them to be and the immensely flawed man and woman they were. He can’t help interrupting his story to plaintively question Ronnie’s motives or backtrack in order to avoid the painful scenes with his father that ended his stay in California.

Silverstein has imbued Alan’s memories with a haunting desperation for answers. There’s something about the interaction between the characters, the way they stagger themselves on the stage, that implies that this story is told every night with or without an audience—as if Alan is alone in a room somewhere, turning these six months of his early adulthood over and over in his mind like a smooth stone. Lemon Sky, and this production in particular, may come closest of any work of art to capturing what it means to remember—especially the things we’d rather forget.

Lemon Sky
Through Oct. 22, Theatre Row, 410 W. 42nd St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), www.keencompany.org; $59.75.