Off World Theatre (www.offworldtheatre.org) of Piermont, NY, and Teaneck, NJ, is back, this time presenting a reading of Count Down by Dominique Cieri in preparation for a full-scale production in November at the Bank Street Theatre in New York City.

Count Down relates the story of young women who have been abused and are placed in a residential treatment facility, get lost in the system, but get a chance to express themselves and reclaim their voice through exposure to the arts and artists.

With a focus on the problems encountered by young victims of domestic abuse and violence, Count Down illuminates the serious social ill of domestic violence and demonstrates the role of the arts and artists in helping girls recover from the horrors of physical and sexual abuse. It is rooted in the playwright's years of experience working with at-risk populations, including sexually abused girls.

Cieri, director Elyse Knight, and Off World's managing director, Joseph Giardina, will be on hand after the reading to hear what audience members have to say. "We hope to learn where the script needs work and what does work that we can build on," says Giardina.

Dominique Cieri is a playwright, teaching artist, and a member of the Dramatists Guild. She received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Playwriting Fellowship in 2003. Her other plays include Pitz & Joe, which won the Davie Award for its presentation at Geva Theatre, was nominated for the American Drama Critics Association Award, and has been optioned for film.

Admission: $9 ($7 for HVWC members)

Dominique Cieri
Playwright

Dominique Cieri is a graduate of Rose Bruford College in Kent, England, where she majored in Theatre. Along with historian Gabriela Weiss, she co-authored the book From the Attic, To the Classroom, To the Stage: The Holocaust. Her Essays on Arts and Education have been published in The New York Times, the Daily Record, New Jersey Theatre Alliance and Teaching Artist Journal. In November 2004, a two part series on Greenfields Juvenile Justice Program was published in the Herald News. She has been designing and teaching playwriting and theatre workshops in New York and New Jersey for many programs, including Theatre for a New Audience, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Young Playwrights, New Jersey Youth Theatre, Artist Teacher Institute, New Jersey Performing Arts Center and Arts Horizons. Dominique’s theatre workshops range from four-day playwriting in the schools, to forty-day residencies. She adapts non-fiction based on the Holocaust into full-length plays written and performed by eighth graders at Yavneh Academy in Paramus, New Jersey.

Elyse Knight
Director

Elyse Knight is a founder and Artistic Director of Off World Theatre. A 25-year veteran of stage, television, film, and radio, Elyse received her BFA in Drama from USC, and has studied with Wynn Handman, Michael Howard, and Caymichael Patten, for whom she teaches acting technique and sense memory classes for adult professional actors.

For Off World Theatre Elyse has directed her own adaptation of the works of California poet Robinson Jeffers Earth, God, America and Men: a memorial; The Traveling Jekyll and Hyde Show, and Count Down by Dominique Cieri, all at the Puffin Cultural Forum.

She is the former Artistic Director of the Unlimited Potential Theatre Company (UPTCo) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she produced and directed main stage productions including All in the Timing, by David Ives, In Your Dreams, a dream project by the UPTCo ensemble, Out of Body, written by the ensemble, and numerous staged readings and touring performances of original works. Elyse also teaches acting workshops and directs plays for the Youth Players at the Depot Theatre in Garrison, New York, including Daisy Pulls it Off, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Bungalow Mystery, Revenge of the Space Pandas, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the Compleat Works of Shakespeare: Abridged.

Acting credits include the Public Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ridiculous Theatre, Caroline’s on Broadway, Stand Up New York, Metropolitan Theatre Company, Manhattan Punch Line, The Medicine Show, The Actors Company Theatre, Too Close For Comfort, One Life to Live, Central Park West, Caroline’s Comedy Hour and Law and Order. Elyse was in the original Off World Dream project, A Night at the Opera: five women’s dreams at Ensemble Studio Theatre and Playwrights’ Theatre of New Jersey.

Programs and events at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center are made possible, in part, by grants from the Bydale Foundation, the David G. Taft Foundation, the Orchard Foundation, and the Thendara Foundation; with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and by the Basic Program Support Grant of the Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government.

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