Shelby Company's Long-Awaited Return to New York!

Hello from New York City! We're here folks, ready to get started on restaging and adding twenty minutes for our run at this year's New York Fringe Festival! we're really excited to get started and show New York what we've got up our sleeves.

AS for the end of Minnesota, well we can only say we were sad to be leaving. It was a blast being in Minneapolis. The people were swell, the weather was (mostly) gorgeous, and everything was so exciting. Morale was up, we were getting great reviews, amazing feedback, and our buzz was still picking up even as we performed our final minute of our closing performance with the house lights on and the stage lights off (we were over our hour time limit by 60 seconds, and them's the rules). When half our team left on Thursday for New York, California and South Carolina (a little break for some of us), the remaing four felt incomplete at Fringe Central on their final night. It was a bittersweet parting with MN, and we certainly hope it's not the last time we see the Twin Cities.

As for our trek to New York, we had some excitement along the way. Stopping just outside Madison, WI with Wren's parents, lovely people, we realized we had a leaking tire! Wren'd dad, a mechanic, was happy to help us out, patching it up, filling up the other three tires, and filling up our oil a little bit. It was so fortunate we realized our tire was flat when we were stopped, and evern more fortunate that Wren's dad could help us out! We got back on the road, and immediately hit a good three hours of traffic into and out of Chicago. We stopped in South Bend, IN for dinner at 9, the hour we hoped to be in Sandusky, OH to sleep. We ate food and discussed the plan. If we slept in South Bend we would have to rise early and drive a good 11 hours to New York the next day. We were hoping to get into New York and realized it wasn't possible from South Bend. We drove on, saying we'd at least get to Ohio, and decide whether we wanted to drive through the night when we got there. We arrived in Ohio just around 1am, refueled, and hit the road. We were diring on to New York. While Wren and Nathaniel slept in the back, Grayson and Brian kept each other company up front. At 520, Grayson's phone rang. Unsure who would be calling so early in the morning, from any US time zone, he took a look and realized it was the alarm he set the previous day to get in order to get on the road. We had been driving for 24 hours, and had only a few more to go. 7am, in the middle of Pennsylvania, Nathaniel took over for Grayson and drove the team home to his apartment in New York. Stopping for a quick bite at a diner in Patterson, New Jersey, we arrived in NYC shortly after 11 am, and nearly thirty hours after we departed Minneapolis.

Brian, Wren and Grayson showered and slept. Nate moved back into his apartment. The rest of the day was a lazy one, full of sleeping and more sleeping, a delicious dinner provided by Vivian, Nathaniel's roommate, exploding tupperware full of salsa, managing to get not on one, not two, but three walls, the floor and Brian's flip-flops, and movies.

Today, the team currently in New York went to The Lafayette Street Theatre, our venue at FrineNYC, to Venue Prep day. We checked out the space, rehung and focused lights, loaded in (almost) everything for our tech on Thursday, and found out we would have to do some rpetty major restaging to accomodate the new stage dimensions. Wren, Will and Grayson went back to Brian's apartment to rehearse a longer version of the script, and Dan is back in California heading up a TheatreWorks Retrospective of the Playwrighting Program, where he was a student and now teaches. Jenni is in sunny South Carolina with her family, and will join us in NYC tomorrow for rehearsals.

We open on Friday folks. Tell all your friends.