Inspired by a true story, Seder is a visceral family drama that weaves together a mother's mysterious past working for the Hungarian KGB with a daughter's outrage over the past atrocities. As the family attempts to celebrate its first Passover Seder, a lifetime of dark secrets is unraveled.
I'm thrilled to be making my Hartford Stage Debut as Margit in Sarah Gancher's beautiful Play.
Tickets Available HERE
Thursday, September 14 at 8:30pm 9:30pm//1620 S.W. Park Ave., Portland, OR 97201
West Coast Premiere: In Ghost Rings, a narrative of friendship and family-making, unfurls through a pop song cycle that burrows and soars with a mix of deadpan magical realism and a thoroughly feminist worldview. Playwright and performer Tina Satter, songwriters and performers Chris Giarmo and Erin Markey and performer Julia Sirna-Frest form a family band of yesteryear as they offer a tender and harrowingly funny, visual and sonic experience that traverses unexpected layers of romance.
The University Settlement let us take over their beautiful space and workshop William Burke's newest creation: Keeners. Alaina Ferris composed the music and we WAILED.
Full New York Time Review HERE
"excellent cast led by the wonderful Ms. Sirna-Frest."-New York Times
Full TimeOut HERE
"Sirna-Frest radiate[s] sweetness"-TimeOut NY
Full Village Voice HERE
"The ensemble cast, playing both individuals and recognizable types, delivers warm, sympathetic portraits of figures that, to a Brooklyn audience, are familiar: evoking our own daily lives, with our own unexamined habits and pleasures, awaiting us after the lights go down."-Village Voice
And some nice words from New York Theater Review
"Sirna-Frest’s Porto is an emphatic blend of warmth, pensivity and dread. It’s a joy to watch her face process the beats of her inner monologue as the narrator moves through a laundry list of anxieties."-NY Theater Review
Full Culturebot Response HERE
a neighborhood bar play with a strong female named Porto (Julia Sirna-Frest, extraordinary) at the center of it. Culturebot
I'm thrilled to be playing Porto in [Porto] by Kate Benson Directed by Lee Sunday Evans opening January 11, 2017 at The Bushwick Starr
Live performance Saturday December 3 at 7pm and 9pm.
Installation on view: 6-10pm on December 3, 12-5pm on December 4, 8 and 11.
A Tunnel Year is a three-part book with a play at its center, built from a few years’ worth of interrupted thoughts crammed into one-line scenes voiced by animals. Germinated in the Bardo of parenthood and compelled to work in the form of the fragment, it asks: Did I escape? Or am I lost? One of its forms is an artist book bridging poem, play, and essay. For The Chocolate Factory, the book will be installed into the room, performed as live radio play, and remaindered as ephemera. With gallery hours, the entire piece can be experienced privately or attended as group experience. Everyone leaves with something in hand.
Written, drawn and installed by Karinne Keithley Syers. Radio play performed by Caleb Bark, Kate Benson, John Gasper, Julia Sirna-Frest, and Karinne Keithley Syers.
"Julia Sirna-Frest’s sonically gorgeous Act I, in which each song (composed by Shane Chapman and Ms. Sirna-Frest) is named for at least one of the play’s characters" -The New York Times
Read Full Review HERE
Read the full review here
As part of Target Margin's Season of O'Neill, I was asked to take on Act One. Shane Chapman and I wrote a song cycle!
THE ICEMAN COMETH
Written by Eugene O’Neill
Lead Artists: Katie Rose McLaughlin, Julia Sirna-Frest, Yuris Skujins, and Jeanette Yew
HERE Arts Center | June 2 – 25 2016 | Tickets On Sale Soon!
Special Marathon Performances | June 11 & 18 ONLY!
145 6th Avenue, New York, NY 10013
To push our O’Neill exploration forward with a bang, our 2016 Lab program presents a radical new approach to THE ICEMAN COMETH, with four diverse theater artists each tackling a separate act of the play. This fresh take on O’Neill’s classic will allow audiences to see each act as a separate experiment, all four together as a unified whole, or both. Lead Artists include Julia Sirna-Frest (actor / director), Katie Rose McLaughlin (choreographer), Yuris Skujins (actor), and Jeanette Yew (lighting/projection designer, director, puppeteer).
ACT I | June 2, 4, & 17
Lead Artist: Julia Sirna-Frest
Shane Chapman and Julia Sirna-Frest present a song cycle that meanders through disCHORDant changes and sing to the sweet oblivion that is life as a listless drunken human. The White Stripes, Eugene O’neal and Funkadelic walk into a bar and drink and sing themselves in to an obliterated raucous life affirming musical explosive stupor. A song cycle with a shot of the real.
I am beyond thrilled to be a part of this production singing and dancing as a Mooncat in Mac Wellman's newest brain child!
Total dream come true to perform at Joe's Pub with Half Straddle! I cannot believe we have been making work for 7 years!!!
I'm thrilled to be singing in Mac Wellman's new play the Offending Gesture. Alaina Ferris has written some beautiful music and we will be performing as a part of Prelude at Cuny Graduate Center .
Thursday, October 8
7:00pm–8:30pm
Elebash Recital Hall
www.preludenyc.org
I'm thrilled to be performing in a beautiful vocal piece written by Paul Pinto on June. 16th, 2015
This event will celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses as the “enraptured paean to the world of the physical senses.” The novel takes place over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, with 18 episodes that correspond to Homer’s Odyssey. Each of the 18 chapters of the book will be transformed into installations of art objects, structures, sounds, videos, performance, food, and more. Our Bloomsday will be an ambulatory experience that will mirror Joyce’s prose in all its juicy, uncompromising, vulnerable, fragmented, and synesthetic confusion.
Participants include:
Abraham Adams, Sonel Breslav (Blonde Art Books), Ashton Cooper, Maggie Craig (Papercut Press), Simon Critchley, Anthony Cudahy, Moze Halperin, Kelsey Harrison, Bethany Ides, Victoria Keddie and Scott Kiernan (E.S.P. TV) Jillian McManemin, Marrek Milde and Kristyna Milde, Claire Mirocha and Vanessa Thill (Sorry Archive), Paul Pino (PAULAPART), Paul Pinto, Nicole Reber, Zefrey Throwell, H. Weaver, Chloe Wyma, Alex Zandi
Reading table organized by Blonde Art Books with contributions from Ugly Duckling Presse, Molasses Books, Mellow Pages Library and more.
All are welcome. Email vanessa@knockdown.center for more info.
June 16, 6pm – 10pm
2015
![Full New York Time Review HERE"excellent cast led by the wonderful Ms. Sirna-Frest."-New York TimesFull TimeOut HERE"Sirna-Frest radiate[s] sweetness"-TimeOut NYFull Village Voice HERE"The ensemble cast, playing both individuals and recognizable typ…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5328960ee4b011eeaa0730e4/1484705713090-1QBWK6S02RU5JW5PLTWG/image-asset.jpeg)
