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Harpo's Salon: A Night of Conversation

Thursday, June 20 | 7pm Doors Open | 7:30pm Performance | 8:30pm Post-Show Hang!

The Attic @ The Tank

312 West 36th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY — see transportation options

Welcome to The Assembly's new performance and conversation salon! We've missed coming together as a community of art-makers and audience members, and so we're thirlled you've joined us in the Attic to drink, snack, see some exciting new works-in-progress by some of our favorite artists, who all happen to be current or former resident artists of The Assembly's Deceleration Lab (you can learn more about their lab work here).

THE LINE-UP

Welcome to Harpo's Salon

Created by Stephen Aubrey, Ben Beckley, Emily Caffery, and Jess Chayes

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Process photo from Memory Bear

Memory Bear

Created by Minna Lee

Using an interactive installation of talking stuffed animals, Memory Bear invites the audience to witness/share messages, stories, and sounds of meaning. A collection of customized plush toys installed with voice recorders will gently guide each visitor through this unreliable magic we call memory. 


This is Our Town inside a Build-a-Bear Workshop.

The Last Mile

Created by Melisa Tien

Featuring Constance Boardman, Flannery Gregg, Connie Hall, Harrow Sansom, Imran Sheikh, Moira Stone, Tyrone Taylor, Ziyan Yang

A theatrical piece featuring movement and text about long-haul truckers and the future of their profession in the face of fast-spreading autonomous vehicle technology. Based on interviews conducted right before the pandemic with truckers along Interstate-80.

Thursday: a fantasia (working title)

Co-Creator & Performer – Erin Amlicke 
Co-Creator & Director – Lillian White 
Sound Designer – Michael Magán

 

Rooted in passionate conversation with G.K. Chesterton’s novella The Man who was Thursday, this solo performance explores first-time queer love and gender expression within a Conservative, Catholic upbringing. Surreal, irreverent and joyfully existential, the play explores identity and disguise with one young woman as she strives to come into her own.

LEAD ARTIST BIOS

ERIN AMLICKE (Thursday co-creator/actor; she/her) is an actor and theatre-maker hailing from Nashville, TN and based in Brooklyn. She’s written and devised plays that have been seen at Burning Coal Theatre Company, Dixon Place, and Edinburgh Fringe. As an actor, she’s performed at Tennessee Shakespeare Company, Philly Fringe, Greenbrier Valley Theatre, Theatre at Monmouth, Burning Coal Theatre Company, Hangar Theatre, The Brick and others. She’s co-founder of Paper Architects Collective and most recently, appeared in their event, La Frontera Flotante, an evening of short, site-specific works in Lima, Peru. She’s a member of The Assembly’s ‘23-’24 Deceleration Lab and has her MFA in Acting from the University of Houston. erinamlicke.com / @erinamlyes

MINNA LEE (Memory Bear; they/them/she/her) is a Hmong-Vietnamese American playwright and animator who brings audiences into whimsical worlds full of queer joy and strange magic. They are a co-recipient of the Dramatist Guild's 2024 Lanford Wilson Award and the creator of an Emily Dickinson-inspired zine called Baller of Amherst. Past work includes My Home on the Moon (World Premiere at San Francisco Playhouse, directed by Mei Ann Teo) and ACTING STRANGER co-written and performed with Andrew Schneider and Fox Whitney (co-production with On the Boards and LA Performance Practice). They are currently developing a new play in Pipeline Theatre's 2024 PlayLab and working on a commission for San Francisco Playhouse. Minna is a 2024-2025 MacDowell Fellow, a member of TAG at The Tank, a New Georges Affiliated Artist, and a 2022 Sesame Workshop Writers' Room Fellow. MFA: Hunter College, Playwriting

 

MELISA TIEN (The Last Mile) is a playwright and librettist invested in making formally unconventional, socially relevant, and emotionally evocative work. A resident of New Dramatists, she is the author of the plays Best Life (JACK, 2021), Yellow Card, Red Card (Ice Factory, 2017), Refrain (Wild Project, 2011), Disrupted, The Boyd Show, The Last Mile, and Familium Vulgare; librettist of the operas Another Shore (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, 2025), Undone (American Opera Projects, 2025),  Forever (Washington National Opera, 2024), The Big Swim (Houston Grand Opera/Asia Society Texas Center, 2024), Song of the Nightingale (On Site Opera/Arts Brookfield, 2023), and The Beehive (University of Northern Iowa, 2023), lyricist for the song cycles Swell (HERE, 2021) and Daylight Saving, co-creator of the podcast/auditory experience Active Listening, and creator of the theatrical experiences Untitled Landscape and Community Forest. She has been published in the anthologies Theater Artists Making Theatre With No Theater (Tripwire Harlot Press, 2020) and Modern Music for New Singers: 21st Century American Art Songs (North Star Music, 2021), and has authored essays for New Music USA and Innovations in Socially Distant Performance. She is currently a librettist with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ New Works Collective, a librettist with the American Opera Project’s Composers & the Voice program, and a recent member of Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative, Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor Residency Lab, Experiments in Opera’s Writers’ Room, and The Assembly Theater Project’s Deceleration Lab. She earned a BA in English from UCLA, and an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. More at www.melisatien.com.

LILLIAN WHITE (Thursday co-creator/director; she/her) hails from South Carolina and currently lives in Lima, Peru, where she has been based since beginning her work as a Julie Taymor World Theatre Fellow. As a creator/director of new, interdisciplinary performance, her work has been presented at HERE Art Center, Dixon Place, Governor’s Island, Burning Coal Theatre, the Cannonball Festival, the BorderLight Festival, and Asheville Fringe, among others. In Peru, she has performed at La Alianza Francesa, La Cabelleriza, El Galpón, Británico Cultural and the Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (LUM). Together with Erin Amlicke, Lillian is a lead artist in The Paper Architects Collective and a member of The Assembly's '23-'24 Deceleration Lab. www.lillianwootenwhite.com, @lillianwootenwhite

THE ASSEMBLY is a multi-disciplinary collective of theater artists committed to realizing a visceral and intelligent theater through sustained collaboration. Founded in 2008, the company has created 11 original works, including IN CORPO (2023); SEAGULLMACHINE (2018); HOME/SICK, a NY Times and Backstage Critics' Pick ("a cutting­ edge young theater collective"­ -NY Times, 2011), revived in 2017 (JACK, Brooklyn); and I WILL LOOK FORWARD TO THIS LATER (2016), praised for its "boldly unhip sincerity" (NY Times). The Assembly has performed in such New York venues as Theatre Row, La MaMa ETC, The New Ohio, The Ontological Incubator, The Prelude Festival, HERE Arts Center, toured to the Edinburgh and Philadelphia Fringe Festivals and The Odyssey Theater in LA. From workshops to productions to post-performance discussions, The Assembly is dedicated to rooting its artists, audiences, and peers in a profound sense of community.

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Rehearsal photos of Thursday: a fantasia

Minna Lee

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Melisa Tien

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Lillian White and Erin Amlicke

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The Assembly is Ben Beckley, Meredith Lucio,
Emily Caffery, Jess Chayes & Stephen Aubrey

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© 2023 by The Assembly Theater Project

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