Saviana Stănescu’s Foresighted ZEBRA 2.0 at Ice Factory Festival

We are delighted to support the 4-day run of Zebra 2.0, a brilliantly conceived and timely fable tackling the dilemmas of AI-human interactions written by acclaimed Romanian-American playwright Saviana Stănescu, which debuts at New Ohio Theater on July 5 as part of the Ice Factory 2023, the Obie Award-winning summer festival.

The play, directed by Jeremy Goren, is a mind-bending, heart-rending and humorous love story between an overworked, romantic immigrant cleaning lady and an AI machine, which questions important topics like the rise of artificial intelligence, the uncertainties of immigrant life, the sense of belonging, and the nature of consciousness.

The July 5 performance will be followed by a Q&A on the blessings and perils of the rise of AI in the arts and beyond featuring Saviana Stănescu, Jeremy Goren,  John Jannone, and Dr. Niki Athanasiadou.

More details about the schedule & tickets HERE.

Zebra 2.0

July 5-8, 7pm, New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher Street, New York, NY 10014

Written by: Saviana Stanescu

Director: Jeremy Goren

Science consultant: Dr. Niki Athanasiadou

Performers: Alina Mihailevschi and Tim Craig

Projection/Video Design: John Jannone, Michi Zaya and Amy Liou

Lighting Design: Xinan Helen Ran

Graphic Design: Billie Starship

Running time: 90 minutes.

The show is co-produced with Anomalous CO, Wistaria Project, Diana Zhdanova, Jordan Friend, and Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva.

Saviana Stănescu is an award-winning Romanian-American playwright, poet, and ARTivist based in New York, author of Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, Ants, Lenin’s Shoe, Hurt, Useless, Toysand many other plays centering the immigrant experience. Winner of New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Play (for Waxing West) and UNITER Award for Best Romanian Play of the Year (for Inflatable Apocalypse), Saviana has published over 15 books of plays and poetry, written in English and Romanian, translated and produced around the world. 

Jeremy Goren is a multidisciplinary performing artist, primarily in devised works, with a focus on experimental, socially engaged performances, generally in non-theatre spaces. Formerly a longtime collaborator with Terra Incognita Theater and the U.S.-based projects of The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, Jeremy works as a lead/collaborating artist in Wistaria Project and with other artists and organizations, primarily as a director, producer, and actor. 

Dr. Niki Athanasiadou is a molecular biologist/data scientist who is using state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithms to transform the dialogue that takes place on stage into digital visualizations that become part of the stage set, reacting to the emotional flows of characters as expressed by the text.