March 8-24, 2024
Island City Stage
www.NewCityPlayers.org
New City Players and Abre Camino Collective are proud to announce their upcoming world premiere co-production of Vanessa Garcia’s play, 1000 Miles, an interactive production that invites audiences to The City; a fictional world of Garcia’s making with striking similarities and differences to our own.
Solis arrives in The City looking for a better future from 1000 Miles Across the Sea, a place that has been ravaged by wars, civil and global. The City is a conflation of cultures, citizens, migrants, immigrants, and refugees. It’s teeming with life, possibility, and a punk energy…but with a rapidly growing population, nationalistic impulses are starting to form. The very skills Solis brings with her could either save or destroy this new place she’s beginning to call home. Will The City take her in or wall her off?
Beyond the other-worldly but also our-worldly feeling of play, audiences can also expect to engage in multiple choice points throughout the production involving and even implicating them in the play’s unfolding story. What does that mean? It means this is not your typical sit back and enjoy the show experience.
Abre Camino Collective founders Victoria Collado and Vanessa Garcia made waves in South Florida and beyond with their wildly successful immersive show, The Amparo Experience, in 2019. Their commitment to innovative forms of storytelling will serve a new experience to New City Players’ audiences. “We love to involve the audience in the show whether that’s through compelling promotional visuals, a free drink table, and our community engagement events connected to the play…but this will be a whole new experience for all of us and we can’t wait to share it”, commented Producing Artistic Director, Tim Davis.
On the relevance of this play at this moment in history, Garcia believes, “We’re living through a moment where we as American creatives have a responsibility to envision a better future. Patriotism, as opposed to Nationalism, is an act of love that necessarily requires us to believe in ourselves, who we are, where we come from, and not just imagine but create a better future for the country we love and that, for many of us, like my family, is the country that took us in. This means recording and illuminating the complicated present and shining a light on the future so that we can smooth out that road. Many of us right now are stuck in darkness. I believe there is light, and we are responsible for making sure that light gets brighter, the light is within us.”
Directing the production is New City Players Associate Artistic Director, Elizabeth Price. When asked why this is a story she wants to tell, here’s what she said, “…because it tells a familiar story in an unfamiliar place. Families separated by war and strife come to a new place that promises new life. Hope is reborn, which is one thing I always look for in stories I tell. But the past has a way of haunting all those starting over and the future becomes murkier as a result. I love that no one in this story is a stereotypical ingenue or leading man; the world of this story is a place of quirky souls carving our lives and dreaming of possibilities, both good and bad. Each character uses humor as armor and disarmer, another thing I always look for. And most exciting of all, sometimes the characters and their world bleed over into the audience’s, so anything can happen!”
The cast features a familiar face in NCP ensemble member Arlette del Toro (previously seen in NCP productions of Falling and Water by the Spoonful) along with respected South Florida talents like Rayner Gabriel, Daniel Llaca, Dayana Morales, and up and comer, Charisma Jolly.
1000 Miles will run from March 8-24 (Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm; Sundays at 3pm; one Saturday at 3pm performance on March 23). Performances will take place at Island City Stage (2304 N. Dixie Hwy, Wilton Manors, 33305). Tickets are $40 for adults, $35 for seniors (65+), and $25 for students (under 25 with ID), with the exception of Thursday night performances, on which $25 tickets will be available for all, and opening night March 8, on which an additional $5 per ticket will include a post-show reception sponsored by Marc Martorana and Commissioner Don D’Arminio.
Tickets can be purchased at www.newcityplayers.org/season or by calling (954)-376-6114. In conjunction with the production, the companies will also be hosting weekly post-show talkbacks after every Sunday show that further explore the themes and process of the play.
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