For Immediate Release: March 16, 2007
Media Contact: David Brown, Gas & Electric Arts, 215.407.0556

Gas & Electric Arts, a Philadelphia based theater company, launches Generating, an intimate Monday night storytelling and wine tasting series at Serrano. Edgy, often hilarious, incredible but true – urban storytelling is gaining momentum nationwide. Be drawn in to this intimate after-work happening where Philadelphians hold sway with moving, often humorous stories that changed their lives. Between tales, patrons can order samples of wines showcased by Vine Street Imports, plus food and drink from Serrano's International comfort food menu.

Generating will kick off on Monday, March 26, 7pm at Serrano, 20 S. 2nd Street, in Old City Philadelphia. The series will continue every other month.

For tickets and information call 215.407.0556 or visit www.gasandelectricarts.org. Tickets are $10. Wine tasting flights are $5. Dining is optional. Admission/wine tasting proceeds benefit Gas & Electric Arts.

Seating begins at 6:30pm, the first story begins at 7:30pm and the rest of the stories happen intermittently throughout the evening. Unlike professional storytellers, those who recount their lives in Generating hail from all over Philadelphia: from chefs to artists, activists, journalists, your regular neighbors, all of whom will leave their public personas behind to share their private stories.

Generating storytellers will hail from all over Philadelphia: from chefs to artists, activists, journalists, your neighbors. Our March tellers include:

• JANE GOLDEN  | Director of the Mural Arts Program
• GRACE GONGLEWSKI  | acclaimed Philadelphia actor
• NICK GREGORY | of the Give & Take Jugglers
• BRIAN HOWARD  |  City Paper Senior Editor
• ALDO MAGAZZENI  | Humanitarian traveler to Afghanistan & Kenya

Inspired by storytelling events across the country such as Second Story in Chicago, The Moth in New York, and popular NPR programs such as “This American Life,” Gas & Electric Arts Artistic Director Lisa Jo Epstein wanted to showcase real life, Philadelphia stories as she has been constantly amazed at how “our city brims with people who naturally tell stories with flair but who haven’t been given a wider stage.” She kept hearing remarkable stories told off-handedly at dinner parties and over coffees, and felt that she was receiving tiny, miraculous gifts, revelations of humanity that constantly unfolded unexpectedly, and she was addicted. A friend of hers reminded Lisa Jo that the minute you fall in love with something, it is yours; that we are constant poets and just need the right chance to reel our imagery up and offer it to others to realize the communal power of our singular experiences. And thus Lisa Jo found herself retelling these tales, trying to recapture the quality and mystery of someone else’s memories, metaphors and images which had appealed to her senses and with which she had identified. “I’ve been reminded that story telling is our oldest and most natural form of exchange and now people do it regularly without realizing it. You don’t have to be a writer, performer or professional to tap into your deep reservoir of images; imagery abounds in everyone. Gas & Electric Arts is committed to producing the work of living playwrights who respond to the world around them through storytelling on the stage where it is visually nourishing, theatrically daring, and intellectually engaging. Since we consider theatre as a form of community building, it seemed logical to develop GENERATING as a festive Philadelphia storytelling series to bring people back to people and remind everyone of their quietly luminous connections to one another.”

Like at a casual party, the GENERATING tellers will simply recount their tales as if for the first time, and in between the curated stories, those assembled can sip wine and tell their own to each other.

March Storyteller Bios

Brian Howard is an editor for the Philadelphia City Paper and has been for quite some time. He is a fan of bicycles, baseball, foreign travel, Ethiopian food, Philadelphia beer and The Human League. He's discovered that all of them can break your heart.

Jane Golden, a native of Margate, NJ, became a mural painter in Los Angeles in 1977. Having heard about the City of Philadelphia's Anti Graffiti Network in 1984, she sent her resume to then Mayor Wilson Goode and was hired part-time. Today, Jane is the Director of the City of Philadelphia Managing Director's Office Mural Arts Program and has tirelessly guided the program in the creation of over 2,400 murals as well as its four art education programs, which serve nearly 1,500 youth. Jane Golden is the co-author of Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell and has received many awards in recognition of her work.

Nick Gregory came to Philadelphia to study theater at Temple University on a tennis scholarship. He lives with his wife Maureen near the Weavers Way Co-op in Mt. Airy and enjoys the Wissahickon woods where he often can be found walking Dost (Turkish for friend), his blond German shepherd. He is active in the community and loves woodworking, cooking, and playing the trombone with local pick-up jazz groups. He also plays baritone tuba, coronet, recorder, piano, and is learning the flugelhorn. Nick is one of the Give & Take Jugglers, a family oriented new vaudeville troupe based in Philadelphia.

Grace Gonglewski (pronounced gong-glef ski) has been making a living as an actor in Philadelphia since 1987 when she came to work for the Walnut Street Theatre. she met her husband choreographer/carpenter/pew fellow Eric Schoefer when she taught him (and many others) a Korean card game at border's 'game night'. She is a fierce mahjong player, a devotee of soups, and totally in love with her three-year-old daughter Silvia Mae.

Aldo Magazzeni is the Chief Executive Officer of Champion Fasteners. Traveling the world to help the poor, he has designed and installed water delivery systems in a half dozen villages in the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan. His ability to make water appear has also earned him many friends in Kenya where he helped build a village for AIDS orphans.

Gas & Electric Arts' mission is to create stage performances, educational programs and community events that respond to the currents of our time and in doing so, engage the hearts, senses and imagination of those who experience our work. We create theatre productions and teach workshops that support storytelling at its best: visually engaging, intellectually nourishing, and which shed light on our humanity. We are called Gas & Electric Arts because we believe that theatre-an art form which embraces all others-- should be an essential part of a community's life, an accessible, vital utility that ignites introspection even as it generates dynamic dialogue around who we are and what we desire. www.gasandelectricarts.org

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