Five teenagers slouch on the furniture in the Pulaski Park field house, gossiping, joking, and talking about getting some junk food to ease the late afternoon munchies. Kelley Minneci shares her news: she just found out she’s been accepted into the acting pro-gram at NYU. Congratulations are offered all around. And then it’s down to the business of show business.
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Magnus, who’s worked with Jellyeye, Curious Theatre Branch, and other alternative performance ventures for over a decade, is intimately familiar with the challenges of shoestring production. “We really have to get the rest of these postcards out to get good houses for these last two weekends,” he reminds the group. “So everyone needs to take a stack and hand them out around school.”
“We have to start learning how to give presentations to corporations for funding,” says Magnus. “We really have to get into this marketing-sales thing this summer, doing the corporate pitch, but coming at it creatively.”
Though some of the visiting performers came to the series (which has been running since January) through Magnus’s many fringe theater connections, others were found and pursued by the PANG members. “We’d search on-line,” says Minneci. “Or through other contacts and networks that we had,” adds Klonsky. Each member serves as the primary contact for at least one artist in the series (ten different performances were slated for this first season), and the other tasks–from running lights to staffing the box office to writing press releases–are divided up equally. The group meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school and on Saturday afternoons, with performances on Friday and Saturday nights.
