David Staller, Artistic Director of Gingold Theatrical Group today announced that in lieu of the 2021 Golden Shamrock Gala, GTG would celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with an IRISH POETRY SLAM, online on Wednesday March 17th, 6:00-7:30pm EDT. The event is FREE! but you must register by March 15th.  In the hours leading up to the shindig, you’ll receive a confirmation and a link! There is a cap to the number of guests who can join via Zoom, so it will also be live streamed on the GTG Faceook page! 

Join Gingold Theatrical Group and an all-star company including Robert Cuccioli, Tyne Daly, Melissa Errico, Jessica Hecht, Daniel Jenkins, Andrea Marcovicci,  Tonya Pinkins, Thom Sesma, Renee Taylor, Sally Wilfert, Karen Ziemba, and more, for a virtual open mic: come as you are and share what you’d like: a poem, an excerpt, a monologue, a saying, a song, or a toast! Shaw, Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, Friel, Beckett, Keane, O’Brien, Johnston, Edgeworth, Heanèy, Lady Gregory, Goldsmith, Moore, etc. Any Irish Writer!

“Ordinarily, we’d be having our annual Golden Shamrock Gala on the 17th, but…nope! This shindig will take place over Zoom! Not Irish? Not a problem. On St. Pat’s, we’re ALL a little Irish. This is just a party. Not a performance. Not a fundraiser. Just a chance for us all to raise a glass and be ‘together’…,” said Mr. Staller.

Now celebrating its 16th year, Gingold Theatrical Group’s Project Shaw made history in December 2009 as the first company ever to present performances of every one of Shaw’s 65 plays (including full-length works, one-acts and sketches). They are now also including plays by writers who share Shaw’s activist socio-political views embracing human rights and free speech, including work by Chekhov, Ibsen, Elizabeth Robins, Rachel Crothers, Pinero, Wilde, Barrie, and Harley Granville-Barker. GTG’s other programs include its new play development and educational programs. For those interested in lively off-site discourses, each Project Shaw event is followed by a talk-back with cast members. GTG’s David Staller and GTG Associate Director Ilana Becker also host Speakers’ Corner which brings together six to ten writers each year who will spend the year exploring a specific Shaw play and writing new work in response to that text.

GTG’s highly acclaimed Off-Broadway engagement of Shaw’s beloved almost historical comedy Caesar & Cleopatra at Theatre Row, hailed as a New York Times Critic’s Pick, was named Best Classical Production in Terry Teachout’s year-end recap of the best theater of 2019 for the Wall Street Journal: “David Staller and the Gingold Theatrical Group nailed it for the second year in a row with another insufficiently appreciated play by George Bernard Shaw, this time a small-scale off-Broadway staging of Caesar and Cleopatra that brought a rarely seen show to persuasive life.” In his review earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal he declared “As always, Mr. Staller, who knows more about Shaw than anyone else in America, gets it right, situating the action of the play in a modern-day archaeological dig and keeping the costumes simple and the diction crisp and clear. Mr. Cuccioli tosses off his epigrams (‘The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it’) with a light, dry touch, while Ms. Lim, who is a terrific find, starts off as Lolita, gradually turning under Caesar’s tutelage into a grown woman who has tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and isn’t sure she likes it. …all the more reason to cheer David Staller’s splendid new adaptation of one of Shaw’s most glittering, least Shakespearean conversation pieces. This is the third of Mr. Staller’s small-scale Gingold Theatrical Group productions to be presented off Broadway at Theatre Row. It follows in the wake of his all-but-flawless 2018 Heartbreak House, an uncommonly hard act to follow, and leaves nothing whatsoever to be desired. May his Shaw stagings become annual events!”