Meet "Creative Infantry"

Daniella Shoshan (PLAYWRIGHT) is a New York (formerly of New Jersey) playwright. Upcoming
works: An Improvised Explosive Device: an MTV war story (FringeNYC 2011);
Jack Perry Is Alive [and Dating] (NYMF 2011). Recent projects include: Yes We
Can (Down Payment Productions, dir. Alec Strum, Walkerspace); Ya Heard Me
(Samuel French OOB Festival 2010, dir. Grant Boyd); They Call Him Young Lou
(MFA Thesis Productions, dir. Pirrone Yousefzadeh, The Cherry Pit); Pluck &
Tenacity (MFA Ten Minute Play Festival, dir. Kim Weild, Second Stage); Tell It
To Me Slowly (FringeNYC 2009). MFA: Columbia University, 2010; BFA: NYU,
2006. She has been mentored by Kia Corthron and Stephen Adly Guirgis. She
bakes crazy delicious cookies.

Grant Boyd (PRODUCER/GILHAM) graduated from Columbia University in 2010 with his MFA in Acting. Recent credits include: at Classic Stage Company - As You Like It (Touchstone); and at Riverside Theatre (dir.Karin Coonrad) - Phoenician Women (Oedipus). Some of his favorite roles include: FringeNYC '09 – Tell It To Me Slowly (Camera 1); Planet Connections Festivity – HOUND (Sir Toby Baskerville); CSC – As You Like It (Sir Toby Belch); Playwrights Horizons – Checkpoint (Guard); FringeNYC ’08 – The Legislative Process (Billy); Schapiro Theatre (dir. Andrei Serban) – Phaedra’s Love (Hippolytus); Atlantis Playmakers – Romeo & Juliet (Romeo); Acadia Repertory Theatre – The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) (Adam); and at Adelphi University – Our Lady of 121st Street (Gail). Grant is a certified stage combatant and an avid Ultimate player (check out the team he plays for here!). BFA: Adelphi University. Grantboyd.net

"An Improvised Explosive Device" -- The Backstory…

Promptly upon graduating from a typically Jersey high school in the mid-middle-class ‘burbs, two of my childhood girlfriends filmed separate audition tapes for MTV’s The Real World – one, clad in her cap and gown and bikini; another, set almost entirely in the back seat of her boyfriend’s (father’s) pimped-out Hummer. These girls were Brownies with me, way back when. They were straight-A students with partial scholarships to Rutgers. But this was the only Real World they were interested in tackling head-on. They sent off their tapes – I think that summer, MTV was casting their Austin, Texas season – around the same time that another childhood friend of ours, Joey Capriglione, opted against any of the three career options he perceived as available to him: working at his father’s Italian deli down the shore; stocking shelves at Shop Rite, or night shift security at Newark Airport Long-Term Parking. Instead, he enlisted in the United States Army. To avoid mooching off his family and being the sort of stereotypical hometown hang-around we used to mock, he went off to basic, moved to Texas, and did two tours of Iraq before Ashley and Monica finally gave up on their dreams of being on The Real World.

Why This Story, Now…

We’re approaching a decade-mark: ten years since the war started; ten years since I crossed a high-school auditorium stage and was promised I could have the world if I wanted it bad enough; ten years since television went from being something we watched to get lost in to something aggressively sought to find ourselves on. 
We’re on to “bigger and better” issues in the forefront of our news-media
(Tea Party uprisings. Obama shortcomings. Pakistan and Korea anythings.) 
and in the frontal lobe of our pop-culture consciousness 
(Twitter rants. Kardashian antics. The facets of Mark Zuckerberg.) 
But soldier suicide rates are on the rise. 
We are all over-medicating 
(Pharmacologically. Technologically. Mythologically.)
And it is on this cusp of political-meets-pop-cultural terrain, this crossroads of who we imagine ourselves to be and who we actually are that this play, 
An Improvised Explosive Device, 
takes place.  

The Take-Away…

An IED requires us to watch how we watch ourselves, asking us to consider the narratives which we adopt and choose to act-out, all the while challenging a television-raised generation to admit who we would be if we thought no one was watching. A fusion of breaking-news issues, mixed media, and reality-television satire, this new play would prove a fiery, thought-provoking and significant success for this year’s FringeNYC.