TO-BY-FOR PRODUCTIONS
PRESENTS
MECHANICS OF LOVE
Playwright Dipika Guha
WRITTEN BY DIPIKA GUHA
DIRECTED BY ELENA ARAOZ
NEW YORK PREMIERE
PREVIEWS SEPTEMBER 8-11
OPENING NIGHT MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
SEPTEMBER 8-24 @ THE PARADISE FACTORY
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To-By-For Productions is proud to present the New York Premiere of Dipika Guha’s MECHANICS OF LOVE, directed by Elena Araoz at The Paradise Factory (64 East 4th Street between 2nd Avenue and Bowery) September 8-24. Performances will be Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30pm and Friday and Saturday at 8pm with matinees on Saturday, September 17 & 24 and Sunday, September 11 & 18 at 2pm, and an opening night performance on Monday, September 12 at 7:30pm. Tickets ($18) are available online at www.tobyforproductions.com or by calling 1-800-838-3006.
In a mythical European city pressed up against a communist state, it is natural that the business of beginning a new world involves forgetting the old one. But when you forget your wife to marry a ballerina with an artificial spine…and the ballerina forgets you to marry your fashionable wife…and then they both fall in love with the mechanic…suddenly, the ordinary rules of love are impossible to follow. This heightened and heartbreaking new comedy questions the laws that govern love, the physics of choosing a spouse, and the miracle of what endures.
Crowded Fire Theater in San Francisco, CA presented the World Premiere of Dipika Guha’s Mechanics of Love in February 2016.
“I am particularly watching the writing of Dipika Guha: an incredible, nuanced playwright, someone who is smart, political, theatrical and deeply, fiercely emotional. She has been in the Women’s Project lab, and is now being produced across the country. I worked with her at both Brown and Yale School of Drama, and the range of her work is extraordinary.”
”Sly humor and blithe poetry…providing some strong justification for Guha’s] rapid rise as an up-and-coming playwright.” Rob Hurwitt, SF Chronicle
DIPIKA GUHA (Playwright) was born in Calcutta and raised in India, Russia and the United Kingdom. She is the inaugural recipient of the Shakespeare’s Sister Playwriting Award with the Lark Play Development Center, A Room of Her Own and the Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival. Her plays include I Enter the Valley (Upcoming: Theatreworks New Play Festival ’16, Southern Rep New Play Festival’16), Mechanics of Love (Crowded Fire Theatre, Upcoming Two by For, NYC), Blown Youth (Upcoming: Wallflower Theatricals, UK) and The Art of Gaman (Berkeley Rep Ground Floor ’16, KILROYS LIST ’16). She is currently writing commissions for South Coast Repertory Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Playwrights Horizons Theatre School. Most recently her work has been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, Roundabout Underground, McCarter Theatre’s Sallie B. Goodman Residency, New Georges, Shotgun Players, the Sam French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, Southern Rep, 24 Hour Plays on Broadway and the Atlantic Theatre Company amongst others. Dipika is currently a visiting artist at the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School and a resident playwright at the Playwrights Foundation. MFA: Yale School of Drama under Paula Vogel. dipikaguha.com
ELENA ARAOZ (Director) is a stage director for theater and opera. This season in NYC, she directs Octavio Solís’s Prospect (Boundless Theatre Company), Dipika Guha’s Mechanics of Love, and will devise She-She-She with Virginia Grise and Hook & Eye for Ice Factory Festival, New Ohio Theatre. She will direct Naomi Wallace’s The Retreating World (Great Plains Theatre Conference) and Two Arms and a Noise (Bucharest International Theatre Platform), which she wrote and directed as a NYTW fellow. She was named The Drama League’s inaugural Beatrice Terry Resident, where she wrote Plastic Drastic, an eco-aware musical adaptation of The Odyssey, and directed for the Rose Theatre. Other productions: Architecture of Becoming (Women’s Project), two Carl Djerassi plays (Off-Broadway), Li Tong’s The Power (Beijing), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Prague Shakespeare), Mac Wellman’s Wu and Horrocks (Sleeping Weazel, ArtsEmerson), Natalia Naman’s Lawnpeople (Cherry Lane Mentor Project), La Traviata (NYCO, BAM), Lucia di Lammermoor (Opera North), Falstaff (Brooklyn Philharmonic, BAM), Latin Lovers (Glimmerglass Opera). Araoz is a New Georges affiliated artist, and a founding member and serves on the artistic collective of The Sol Project. www.elenaaraoz.com
TO-BY-FOR PRODUCTIONS is a female-driven theatre and film production company dedicated to making work by women, for everyone. They aim to tell three-dimensional female stories through a non-male lens, to challenge the industry standard that art by and about women will only be consumed by women, and to produce each work in the medium that best suits the story. Since their inception last year, they have produced After Ever After, a web series that explores Disney’s damaging romantic paradigms, Stitches, a world premiere play about self-betterment and self-harm, and Marie Marie Marlene, an original cabaret act about celebrity branding and worship as told through the life and legend of Marlene Dietrich.
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