Selected Shorts: Uncharted Territories
Saturday, April 22, 2023 at 8pm

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This performance is presented without an intermission.

Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation, creator of The Rea Award for the Short Story. Support is also provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, The Achelis and Bodman Foundation, the Henry Nias Foundation, the Charina Endowment Fund, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Michael Tuch Foundation, the Vidda Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, and The Grodzins Fund. Selected Shorts is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Symphony Space thanks our generous supporters, including our Board of Directors, Producers Circle, and members, who make our programs possible with their annual support.

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Reality by Diana Spechler

Performed by Kirsten Vangsness

The Weave by Charles Johnson

Performed by Arnell Powell

Time Invents Us by Anita Felicelli

Performed by Kirsten Vangsness

Confido by Kurt Vonnegut

Performed by Nate Corddry

Nate Corddry is an actor, comedian, and writer who has recently been featured on the television series Fosse/Verdon, Mindhunter, For All Mankind, and Perry Mason, as well as the Marvel podcast Wastelanders: Black Widow. Additional film and television credits include Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip; United States of Tara; Harry’s Law; Childrens Hospital; TRON: Uprising; St. Vincent; The Heat; Mom; The Hindenburg Explodes!; The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; The Circle; New Girl; Ghostbusters; Standing Up, Falling Down; Paper Girls; Gaslit; High School; and as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Corddry will appear in the forthcoming Apple TV+ series Suga

Anita Felicelli is the author of the short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award for fiction, and Chimerica: A Novel. She is the editor of Alta Journal's California Book Club and served as Fiction Committee Chair for the National Book Critics Circle for 2022. Her short stories have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Alta, Air/Light, Midnight Breakfast, The Normal School, and Joyland. A finalist for a Los Angeles Press Club National Arts and Entertainment awards, she has contributed essays and reviews to the Washington Post, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times (Modern Love), the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere.

Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, the author of 27 books, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. A MacArthur fellow, his fiction includes Night Hawks, Dr. King’s Refrigerator, Dreamer, Faith and the Good Thing, Oxherding Tale, and Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Arnell Powell has guest starred and recurred on several television series, including Stranger Things, Lone Star 911, Bosch, Snowfall, and most recently as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s father on HBO’s Winning Time. His film appearances include The Conjuring and Hidden Figures. He can be seen in numerous commercials and is an award–winning Audiobook narrator. Powell earned his M.F.A. in Acting from NYU’s Graduate Acting School. He has taught at Harlem School of the Arts as well as for the NYC Dept of Education, and coaches privately here in Los Angeles.

Diana Spechler is the author of the novels Who by Fire and Skinny. Her essays and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Esquire, The Guardian, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Glimmer Train Stories, Playboy, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, GQ, Southern Review, and Harper's. She has received awards from Yaddo, A Room of Her Own Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship, Ucross Foundation, and elsewhere. She writes a monthly newsletter called Dispatches from the Road.

Kirsten Vangsness is best known as Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds, which just began a new season streaming on Paramount+. Her recent performances include starring in the world premiere of the new Phinny Kiyomura play Nimrod at Theatre of NOTE and Justin Elizabeth Sayers’ Lottie Pratchett Took a Hatchet at San Francisco Sketchfest. In 2019, two of her plays, Mess and Cleo, Theo and Wu, were performed at Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to critical acclaim. In her spare time, Vangsness buses tables at the Blinking Owl Distillery.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) was one of the grandmasters of modern American letters. Called by The New York Times "the counterculture's novelist," his works guided a generation through the miasma of war and greed that was life in the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century. Vonnegut rose to prominence with the publication of Cat's Cradle in 1963. Several modern classics, including God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Slaughterhouse-Five; and Breakfast of Champions soon followed. Vonnegut’s letters, essays, and short stories have been anthologized in dozens of collections, including A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, and Complete Stories.

“Reality” by Diana Spechler, winner of the 2021 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. Copyright © 2021 by Diana Spechler. Used by permission of the author.

“The Weave” by Charles Johnson. Copyright © 2014 by Charles Johnson. Originally appeared in The Iowa Review. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the author.

“Time Invents Us” by Anita Felicelli. Originally appeared in Alta (Fall 2020/Issue 13). Copyright © 2020 by Anita Felicelli. Used by permission of the author.

“Confido” by Kurt Vonnegut, from Look at the Birdie (Delacorte Press, 2009). Copyright © 2009 by Kurt Vonnegut. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency.

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