Date: July 23rd 2009

July 22, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ONE-WOMAN SHOW COMES TO TOWLE THEATER

Actress and playwright Alison Vodnoy will be performing her original one-woman show In Rehearsal at the Towle Theater in Hammond, Indiana on August 7-9 and 14-16. The Friday and Saturday performances will be at 8pm. The Sunday performances will be at 2pm. Tickets are available through the Towle Theater box office 219-937-8780 or visit www.towletheater.org. Tickets are only $15. All tickets must be paid for in advance and are non-refundable. The Towle Theatre is located in beautiful downtown Hammond at 5205 Hohman Avenue. Free, well-lit, secured parking is available just off of Fayette Street only steps away from our alley entrance at the back of the theater.

Alison is the daughter of Kayla Vodnoy, Spanish teacher at Chesterton High School and Robert Vodnoy, the music director of the Whiting Park Festival Orchestra. She graduated from Chesterton High School in 2005.

Last summer, Alison made a successful tour of the show to the Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis Fringe Festivals. In Rehearsal explores the joys and challenges of interfaith, heterosexual, and homosexual relationships through comedy, drama, and modern dance. Vodnoy wrote the show in the fall of 2007 for which she won a First Place Award in a playwriting competition at University of Cincinnati. The production of In Rehearsal was directed by Giles Davies, a 9-year company member of the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. In Rehearsal received many accolades from the Cincinnati theater community. Vodnoy won two Acclaim Awards for Best Solo Performance and Best Solo Script, garnering two of the three Acclaim Awards given to Fringe shows this season. The show was also recognized with a “Critics’ Pick”.

In Rehearsal tells the story of Akiva, an actress with numerous failed relationships. "Akiva talks about the intimacy and the sacred nature of the relationship between the actor and the audience. That kind of intimate relationship is what she can never achieve with a real person," Vodnoy says. "I'm using the idea of theater and the imagination that it requires, juxtaposed with the problems created by imagining what you want a relationship to be, rather than experiencing what it is in reality. Akiva thinks that dating is just a rehearsal; that she can have people play the roles that she wants them to play in her life." In the course of the one-hour play, Alison portrays Akiva and the six men and one woman whom Akiva dated to tell the other side of the story.

Joseph McDonough of the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote: “In what is shaping up to be the strongest Fringe Fest yet, CCM senior Alison Vodnoy's In Rehearsal stands out among the best of the best. Using choreographed movement that is graceful but relentless, she portrays the woman and all of her lovers with a sharp specificity that is wonderfully witty yet unexpectedly sad.”

Jane Durrell of City Beat wrote: “Alison Vodnoy…is one multi-talented young woman. For In Rehearsal she pulls out all her talents…and uses her dancer’s body to do fabulous things in telling the story.”

Brian Griffin in The Conveyer wrote that the audience watches Akiva “going through her lovers one by one, tearing them down piece by piece, with a hilariously soft viciousness…The portrayal of Akiva's lovers is also well done…Vodnoy as the 32 year old married man was a stand out.”
Alison is familiar to northwest Indiana audiences from her performances with numerous theater groups in northwest Indiana. She performed the roles of Sandy in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Darlene in Balm in Gilead at the Chicago Street Theatre (Valparaiso), Louise in Gypsy at the Memorial Opera House (Valparaiso), and as Romaine Patterson in Laramie Project at the 4th Street Theatre (Chesterton).
Last March, Alison graduated from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music with a degree in theater. She has also appeared at the Cincinnati Fringe in iLove (2007) and (UN)Natural Disaster (2006). At CCM, she has appeared as Alex in On the Verge, Nancy in Recent Tragic Events, Thyona in Big Love, and in Anon(ymous). At CCM, she also appeared in The Good Person of Setzuan, Comedy of Errors, The Lucretia Legend, The Vagina Monologues, and R&J by William Shakespeare. She also played the starring role in the Northern Fort Playhouse (South Dakota) production of Sylvia (2006), and Jewel in Dead City at the New Stage Collective in Cincinnati. She has studied at the Young Actors Program at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Ontario, Canada), the Rutgers University Summer Program (New Jersey), and the Young Actors Shakespeare workshop at Valparaiso University.

For more information about these performances and In Rehearsal, go to: www.alisonvodnoy.com and www.towletheatre.org. For more information about this story, contact Alison Vodnoy at:
219-928-8685 or alisonvodnoy@gmail.com.




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