The Tin Ceiling presents the winner of the 2008 Tin Ceiling-sponsored full length playwriting contest, Jeremy Johnson's "Breaking Out Of Hell".

In this dark comedy we follow the story of two men harboring the desire to jump, rather than shuffle, off their despairingly mundane and mortal coils. The decision to do so, however, leaves them grappling with a less than satisfactory existence on "the other side" as they attempt to finagle their way past God, the Devil, and Death himself to escape the eternity that fate has planned for them.


"Breaking Out Of Hell" will be showing at 8 pm on Fri, Sat and Sun of July 17th through July 26th.


Tin Ceiling Theater
3159 Cherokee Street, St. Louis, MO 63118
(at the corner of Compton and Cherokee)

For reservations call 314.341.0326 or email tinceiling@gmail.com

As we move into beginning our 10th official season, we are calling on our friends and supporters to help us along. A donations page has been set up on our website for easy and secure online payments through Paypal. A donation of even $20 would be greatly appreciated. We know that times are tough for a lot of people, including some of us! We look to the Tin Ceiling to be a fun release and escape from our everyday lives. Your donation is tax-deductible. Thank you!

http://tinceiling.org/donations.html

The Tin Ceiling and The NonProphet Theater Company present seven/24 v8.0
seven/24 is a mad dash to write, cast, rehearse and perform seven 10 minute plays in the course of 24 hours. It's always exciting, it's always fun, and you never know what will happen.
Auditions Friday, May 22 at the Tin Ceiling Theater, located at 3159 Cherokee Street at Compton Street, St. Louis, MO 63118. Those auditioning will be asked to read from a side, or a monologue may be prepared if desired. Head shots and resumes are welcome but not required. Casting calls will begin the morning of Saturday, May 23. If auditioning, please be available beginning at 9:00am.
seven/24 v8.0 Saturday, May 23 at 8:00pm at the Studio Theater at Grand Center 501 N. Grand in St. Louis, MO 63103
Admission is $10, and tickets are available at the door. For more information on seven/24 v8.0, including ticket info and reservations, contact Maria Straub at 314.723.0873 or contact us at tinceiling.org

The Tin Ceiling has picked its winners from the 2008 Playwriting Competition. We realize it has taken a lot longer than planned! The winners have been contacted and an announcement will be made shortly regarding the dates for the shows.

At this time there are no plans to hold another competition. Though we have received a lot of requests, so never say never!

Our upcoming seasion is going to be a great one, so keep checking back for a schedule of events.

Recommended shows Fringe Binge 2008
Monsters In The Wood

* * * *(four stars)


Cowering like a "white trash Bill Bixby hiding his curse," writer-performer Brad Lawrence employs vivid metaphors for his rural Missourian adolescence among the rednecks; those title monsters happen to be his relatives, many of whom meet with stupid, violent ends while the boy seethes with embarrassment and plots his daring escape. Lawrence, besuited and sharp-tongued, perhaps passes too well for a New Yorker these days. He needs to better use his body and twang to fill up the empty stage with transformation. Still, this is a brave, honest work, mapping out the "mountain of hate" that lurks under more transplants than we'd care to know.

Joshua Rothkopf - TimeOut New York

Aug 8, 2008
Brad Lawrence calls Monsters in the Wood, his one-man, precision-sharp skewering of his Ozark roots, "A Comedy About Death." At the start of the show, he places us in a funeral parlor featuring not one, but two caskets containing relatives, one of whom is reposed with enough Harley-Davidson regalia to make the casket look like an HD gift shop. Turns out, he never even owned a bike. Candid, scathing little jewels like this are revealed about family member after family member, and a shocking number of them do not make it to a ripe old age as the stories lace and interfold—when you live in a small town in southern Missouri, you will appear as a principal character in the lives of most everybody in town, and with the fairly limited marrying pool, most likely as a relative.
If you haven't guessed, Brad Lawrence comes from "rednecks." It's the term he uses—these are not gentle, rocking-chair-on-the-porch yarns about crazy good ol' boys. For one hour on a bare stage, he has nothing but his dry, harrowing sense of hubris to hold the audience, and he is fascinating unquestionably. There is no twang in his voice, except and only upon the instant he flashes it on with the harsh authenticity of someone making a point. Humor is his primary angle throughout, but the edge of it demarcates a deeper, darker place of alienation—an unwillingness to hygienically sieve hypocrisy and baseness out of his family's tragic story details, and a gritty acceptance that total escape from his origins will never be possible.
Lawrence, under the deftly light director's touch of Burke Heffner, uses only the bare minimum of lighting and staging to set up details—the focused emphasis of his perspective paints a perfect picture in our minds. As he walks us through the funeral parlor packed with family members who have brought beer inside successfully, but not other prized possessions ("You will NOT bring those dogs inside!" his mother is forced to command one funeral attendee), he maintains a hilarious detachment that skillfully sets this show beyond many solo stage memoirs I've seen in Fringe festivals past. Audiences at such shows are often unable to match the performer's earnest fascination with his own life, as though having a life story were somehow unusual. Lawrence, in contrast, knows when to stay out of the way of his own narration, and allow his characters to be more prominent than himself. It's the mark of a seasoned storyteller. Even when he reveals how his own identity was formed by a youth amongst such people, he does so with humility, using humor to stay in relation to the audience. The journey he leads is not intent on celebrating his own specialness, but on captivating through its everyman, "stranger in a strange land" quality—a Gulliver's Travels of the Bible Belt.

Mathew Trumbull - NYTheater.com

Forget about the death rituals of other cultures - just understanding the way different Americans cope with the end of life can be a full-time occupation. But it doesn't have to be an entirely somber one: Brad Lawrence proves in his one-man show Monsters in the Wood that death can indeed be a laughing matter.

Well, sort of. Lawrence's tale of growing up in self-destructive Southern Missouri, which has been suavely directed by Burke Heffner, is rife with ironic commentary about the "good ol' boys" who were his family and friends, and the time-bomb life he narrowly escaped. He finds plenty of humor in rattling off the torrid details of his relations' relationships, how they affected him, and how he affected them in return, his straight-backed, aloof manner and deadpan delivery providing dizzy and ditzy contrast to the background he claims but suppresses with every impeccably chosen vowel he utters.

Lawrence can't, however, ignore or hide the undercurrents of disappointment, pain, and loss that have led him to this point, and it's those that give him and his play the humanity that identifies them as something more than self-concerned ramblings of a reformed redneck. Even Monsters in the Wood's funniest moments are tinged with an inky bleakness paying heed to the mortality his upbringing so openly taunted. Lawrence opens the play at a double funeral, then expounds on the lives of the deceased and those closest to them - and then on those people's deaths as well. For those Lawrence knew in the Ozarks, death wasn't just the end of life - it was the way of life.

For many, the political implications will be obvious. But Lawrence avoids addressing them directly, and instead focuses on the personal details that give him the authority he needs to define himself as (in the words of a troubled girlfriend) "always a stranger in a strange land." Of course that's what he is. But his story terrifies as it entertains because it reminds you that on some level, none of us is any better: However we may appear on the outside, we're all running from something, to something, or perhaps in circles. If dying is hard and comedy hard, being honest about yourself must be downright impossible. Lawrence, however, makes all the three appear equally effortless - and important.

Mathew Murray - talkinbroadway.com

hat: True West by Sam Shepard

Who: Presented by Tin Ceiling Productions.                                                  

When: Fridays, Saturdays, & Sundays, July 11-13, 18-20, 25-27.  All shows

8pm

Where: 3159 Cherokee St (at the corner of Compton and Cherokee in south city)

How much:            Just $10 at the door!

 

PLAY'S SUMMARY AND FEATURING:

Hot on the heels of the Tin Ceiling's riotous seven/24 vii, the Tin Ceiling continues its eighth season with an exploration into the heat of fraternal tension and the dark lands of the creative writing process with its production of True West by Pulitzer-prize winning author Sam Shepard.

True West is a comic nightmare of confrontation. Austin is an ambitious Hollywood screenwriter working on a potential million-dollar deal when an ill wind off the desert blows in his brother Lee, a hobo thief with a six-pack and a case of sibling rivalry. The conflict arises when a film producer offers Lee the chance to write a "true" western. In a role reversal as intricate as it is riveting, the brothers head toward Shepard's outrageous showdown.

Come join us for the second show of our eighth season, a highly kinetic production that will make you wonder where your toaster went, solve the age old question of typewriter vs golf club, and leave you looking twice at your sibling.

TIN CEILING SUMMARY

In the beginning there was the nothing, not even a stage, in a place once known as the Centro Sociale. Then along came Robin Garrels armed with a script called Supernatural Moralities, and she brought substance from nothing. The play, which ran during the late summer of 2000, was a complex work involving love, death, trees, and the destruction and salvation of mankind. 

Since then the Tin Ceiling has developed into a 501©(3) non-profit organization dedicated to providing alternative and inspiring entertainment to the St. Louis community, specifically by showcasing the works of local talent.  Now settled in their new home on Cherokee Street in South St. Louis, the Tin Ceiling continues its commitment to the area by producing original works, written by, directed by, and starring St. Louis' up and coming artists including such recent hits as Zombozo, A Length of Rope, and Conscription of the Fates.

"The Tin Ceiling is a definite innovator in St. Louis theatre."  Tyson Blanquart, playbackSTL

"In a town of mushy old plays, gray as an oyster, Tin Ceiling remains the seemingly unbreakable pearl hidden inside."  Richard Green, KDHX Radio