Vivid Stage presents this reading series on the lawn outside the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. Bring a comfy lawn chair and your favorite snack to enjoy a summer eve with us.
Brisé by Ian August
Featuring Jason Szamretal Directed by Laura Ekstrand
Following a nasty fall, professional dancer Paul is diagnosed with a rare form of dementia. In a daily video diary, Paul details his day-to-day life with his new condition. But when his estranged mother arrives, Paul is forced to face hard family truths that had been buried for years, even as everything else slips away. Brisé is a one-man play about voice, about movement, and about holding on tight to the things we try our hardest to forget.
Ian August is a NJ based playwright and lyricist, whose works have been performed across the U.S., as well as in Canada, Australia, the UK, South Korea, and Bermuda. His plays have been developed at the PlayPenn New Play Conference, the Powerhouse Theatre Festival (Vassar / New York Stage and Film), the Great Plains Theatre Conference and elsewhere. Mr. August is a member of the American Theatre Group’s ATG PlayLab, and a graduated member of PlayPenn’s playwriting lab, The Foundry. Several of his short plays have been published by Sam French Inc., Smith and Kraus Publishing, the One-Act Play Depot, and Pipeline / Applause Books. He was a 2019 Playwright in Residence at the William Inge Center for the Arts in Independence, Kansas, and graduate of Goddard College’s Creative Writing MFA Program. In 2021, Mr. August was the recipient of an Independent Artist Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts. He is also an adjunct professor of Playwriting at Stockton University in Stockton, NJ. Mr. August lives at a boarding school with one husband, three cats, and approximately 830 teenage children.
