Taurus 28°

Hello Would-be Sponsor
 
Quinn Cox here. I founded the Afterglow Festival with John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) in 2011 with the dream of providing Provincetown a star on the international live-performing-arts map along with Edinburgh and Sydney and Rome and London and Lyon and San Francisco and other major live-arts festivals around the world. Now entering its sixth year, the Afterglow Festival has, in effect, reached this goal, having presented upwards of fifty artists, many of whom have gone on to great success if not achieving household-name status.
 
As well as being the longest continuous fine-arts colony in the country, Provincetown is also the birthplace of the modern American stage. Dating back to when Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell and the Provincetown Players first wrote and produced plays here, through the years that Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams followed suit, up through the 1960s, Provincetown was synonymous with modern playwriting and production. Likewise, progressive performers and those outside the mainstream, including Billie Holiday, Jim Baily, Eartha Kitt, Lynne Carter, Nina Simone, even Paul Lynde, Lily Tomlin and Divine, found the freedom to create on Provincetown stages where they otherwise felt restrained. And even more avant-garde performances and happenings found expression in Provincetown.
 
Somewhere along the way, around the 1970s and certainly in the 1980s, Provincetown’s legacy as the birthplace of modern American theater got lost in the shuffle of resort amusement; and, nowadays, in the face of multi-million-dollar gentrification and big-ticket entertainment via big-name Broadway and television stars, the only way to preserve Provincetown’s independentstage heritage, and to create space for the emerging and experimenting performing artist is to do so not-for-profit, which is exactly what the Afterglow Festival and its ancillary projects seeks to do.
 
The Afterglow Festival is a fully fledged 501 c 3 charitable arts organization to which cash and in-kind contributions are tax deductible to the full extent of the law. Our list of distinguished sponsors this year includes famed author J.K. Rowling, The Tony Randall Theatrical Fund, The Diller – von Furstenberg Family Foundation, Salt Hotels and many local businesses and individuals. Our esteemed Artistic Board includes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, Tony award winner John Cameron Mitchell, performers Penny Arcade, Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac, John Kelly, poet Eileen Myles and other notable figures.
 
Afterglow is foremost dedicated to preserving Provincetown’s birthright as the birth place of the modern American stage and to making Provincetown an international live performing arts festival destination. In regard to the latter, we are developing what will be The Glow Theatre, expressly designed to create and foster new plays for the American stage. This enterprise will have it’s own Advisory Board headed by fellow Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Playwrights, Doug Wright and Tony Kushner. 
 
In our continually gentrifying resort landscape and real estate market, with those big  Broadway names and at big ticket prices, Provincetown’s heritage as a home to progressive performing artists and an incubator for their work is more precarious than ever before in its history. The Afterglow Festival is keeping this legacy alive, through its non-profit work presenting myriad forms of theater and performance.
 
We are also preserving the link between Provincetown and the Greenwich Village performing arts communities, as well as between P-town and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Afterglow collaborates with both Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York and the American Repertory Theater and Club Oberon at Harvard. A Fall/Winter series collaboration between Afterglow and Oberon, called Glowberon, was a huge hit last year in Cambridge and a second series for the coming series is already selling out.
 
As an generator of new plays and performances pieces, the Afterglow Festival has premiered and developed such work as sequel material to Hedwig and the Angry Inch by John Cameron Mitchell, Afterglow’s co-founder, James Lecesne’s Absolute Brightness, which just finished a run Off-Broadway, Penny Arcade’s Longing Lasts Longer, which is currently touring the international festival circuit, Stella Starsky’s Birth of the American Baroness which has been staged at Joe’s Pub at the Public and at Oberon/ART, Mike Albo’s The Junket, Justin Vivian Bond’s Mx. America (Mx. Bond’s Experiment in Terror), Tina Alexis Allen’s In The Name of the Father, directed by Lee Breuer (Mabou Mines), and Dane Terry’s Anytime Moe, which is being further developed by New York’s PS 122 who awarded Terry a coveted Ethel Eichelberger award.
 
More than ever, Afterglow needs the support of its Sponsors, and we hope that you will hop aboard our dream train to help our festival and all our good works.
 
All best
Q

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*

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