Two writer-performers bring new plays to the third annual Circle Theater Festival at AMT Theater, October 26–November 15: Bryce Gerson's one-man thriller Hold and Chris Mathis's two-hander Unreached Things.
The festival is run by RJ Theatre Company and TAL Media, and plays AMT Theater at 354 West 45th Street.
Hold is written and performed by Gerson, an actor and filmmaker whose short film Finding won him Best Actor in a Short at the Cannes World Film Festival. It is his Off-Broadway debut and the play's New York premiere. Gerson plays Miles, a volunteer on a suicide hotline who takes a call from a stranger who knows the thing he has spent years trying to bury: the night at college when he ignored a desperate knock on his dorm-room door. Gerson built the piece to run on restraint, with one performer holding the whole thing.
It shares a bill with Ashlyn Hughes' Good Grievers. Performances are October 26 at 8 p.m., November 1 at 2 p.m., November 3 at 8 p.m., November 8 at 2 p.m., November 9 at 9:30 p.m. and November 15 at 2 p.m. The production carries a content warning for themes of suicide and grief. Tickets are on Ticketleap.
Unreached Things comes from Chattanooga. Mathis wrote and directs the one-act and plays Kai opposite Chattanooga actor Cortney Warner as Quinn; a dinner Quinn hosts for Kai's mother turns into a reckoning with love, memory and the conversations the two never finished. Mathis' first produced play, The Body, premiered at the Next Exit Productions New Play Festival in Chattanooga.
"Bringing this story to New York feels incredibly special," Mathis said. It has six performances: October 28 and November 1, 2, 8, 9 and 15. The company asks audiences buying for this show to use the code UNREACHED.
