"The Winter of April," a Police Thriller partly inspired by the Gilgo Beach murders on Long Island in 2010, compares the fate of murdered sex workers with that of historical women who have been shadowed or forgotten, including those, like Ada Lovelace, who were at the forefront of science and technology. The play was written and structured by Ricardo Sarmiento Gaffurri from a concept by director Ramiro Antonio Sandoval and his Tabula RaSa NYC Theater & Performance Lab. It is mounted with ensemble acting, sophisticated audiovisuals and multimedia modeling. The piece protests society's tendency to tie sexual crimes to only one perpetrator, when that individual is usually the tip of an iceberg- -a global machine of prostitution.
The Gilgo Beach murders is an unsolved 2010 case that began when police recovered the body of a woman working as an "escort," then inadvertently stumbled upon a burial grounds, in the beach's dunes, of eight other people including lost girls, prostitutes and runaways. One theory is that a single killer deposited them there; another is that it was the dumping ground for a bigger operation. The play imagines the latter situation and begs us to consider how societies allow such soulless individuals to have their way.
The style of the play might be described as fantastic realism, or as "steampunk"-- fiction with a goth makeover. The title page of its script describes it as "a fictional waltz in three movements" that is "inspired by thousands of stories per year."
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE:
THURSDAY thru SATURDAY @ 8 PM
SUNDAY @ 3 PM
