YO MISS! 

“You don’t know my struggle, you haven’t a clue,” proclaimed Sandup Sherpa, from Nepal, who had just dazzled the class with his break dancing. Stephanie’s family fled machete-wielding attackers during a 2004 coup. Hadeel’s father was shot in the face in Baghdad because he worked as a translator for the United States military. Sandup’s father, a legislator, was targeted for assassination by Maoist rebels and now lives in Elmhurst, Queens, selling cellphones. Leading the recent rehearsal at the International High School at LaGuardia Community College was Judith Sloan…She has spent a decade documenting immigrants’ stories and teaching teenagers to transform their experiences into theater—mainly in Queens, which, with 167 nationalities and 116 languages, was deemed the nation’s most diverse county in the 2000 census.

Ms. Sloan’s art and teaching cross-pollinate: She uses immigrant stories that she and her husband wrote about — dozens of them are included in a 2003 book, “Crossing the BLVD”—to demonstrate how to shape narrative and to get students talking about their lives. And the students flood her with new material. As she helps the students compose the performance, she is also coming full circle with a new work of her own. “Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide,” which she performs with musical collaborators, re-enacts and riffs on her experiences teaching teenagers from myriad worlds: refugee camps, struggling neighborhoods, prisons. It is a performance about performances, a story containing many stories. And suddenly, “Yo Miss!” has another mission: To raise money to keep the story going. The New York Times, Anne Barnard

Yo Miss! is as artfully composed and intelligently framed as it is emotionally gutsy, It’s a fully realized piece of inventive theater that packs a punch – and a lesson. In a whizzing-by hour-and-a-half Sloan shows us an assortment of students of many nationalities, many of them immigrants and children of immigrants. Some have fled foreign horrors only to find confusion and disappointment in the poor outer-borough neighborhoods of New York. – BlogCritics.org, Jon Sobel

Fusing the art of theatre, poetry, and music, YO MISS! is a sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always truth-telling show about immigrant/refugee teenagers and incarcerated youth grappling with the cataclysmic events that shaped them. Using midi-controllers and an original musical score to accompany her compelling performance, Judith Sloan remixes her own traumatic experiences with those of her students and transforms into a multitude of characters ages 14 to 80.
Written and Performed by Judith Sloan
Direction: Matt Gould
Dramaturgy: Morgan Jenness
Performed solo or with live musicians.

“This deeply felt and richly entertaining show frames its earthy soulfulness in high-concept theater with ease. In a whizzing-by hour Sloan plays an assortment of students of many nationalities, immigrant teenagers and incarcerated youth with the simplest of adjustments–a headscarf, an accent–then fortifies the scene with crowds of recorded characters whose voices she mixes live onstage, operating several MIDI controllers with her fingers and feet. As artfully composed and intelligently framed as it is emotionally gutsy…It is a fully realized piece of inventive theater that packs a punch – and a lesson.” -BlogCritics Jon Sobel

“Immigrant life as told in the intimate, rich, comic, ironic and sad stories so often seen but not heard in America’s big cities.”  The Washington Post, Lynn Duke

“Crossing the BLVD is a whirlwind tour and love poem of what has often been called the most racially and ethnically diverse county in America. In the tradition of the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, Ms. Sloan performs “Crossing the BLVD” adopting the personae (and respectfully mimicking the accents) of the varied immigrants whose stories are in the book… The New York Times, City Room Blog, Sewell Chan

“Crossing boldly carries the tradition of oral history into the 21st Century. Electrifying!”   Eve Ensler author The Vagina Monologues

Featured as a “Global Hit”
“An incredible and moving story… Sloan and Lehrer spent three years talking to immigrants and refugees in Queens, traveling the world, in a sense, while never leaving their backyard… a place where new immigrants from every corner of the globe come to start their lives in America. The result is a unique multi-media project. Oral History with a twist!” The World, PRI/BBC Marco Werman

“Behind the drab storefronts and nondescript homes that define the borough, Sloan and Lehrer discover a soulful place teaming with immigrants from Mexico to Australia whose stories unfold in a kaleidoscope of color…”
CNN

Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America

As immigration policy is hotly debated around the country in terms of national and cultural security, Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America presents the human stories of why immigrants and refugees have migrated to the US and what their experiences have been since they came here pre- and post-9/11. Based on Lehrer and Sloan’s critically acclaimed book, actor/writer Judith Sloan channels many of the people that the couple interviewed on their three-year journey around the world through the borough of Queens, New York. The performance is illuminated by projections of Lehrer’s stunning photographs  along with an original soundtrack of music and sounds, including Sloan’s audio mixes, music by Scott Johnson and Gogol Bordello. Home to the New York airports, Queens, is no longer made up of neatly partitioned ethnic enclaves. Today the choreography of Queens, a place where residents speak 138 different languages, is one of chaotic co-existence. This group portrait of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial community is a magnifying glass for the future of America. Above all, Crossing the BLVD is a celebration of resilient, prismatic character – in search of home.

Winner 2004 Brendan Gill Prize Municipal Art Society of NY

Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America
Written by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan
Performed by Judith Sloan
Photography and design by Warren Lehrer

To inquire about a performance CLICK HERE

BUY THE BOOK ON AMAZON

Denial of the Fittest: excavations of untold truths and other outbursts

Denial of the Fittest: excavations of untold truths and other outbursts is a one woman show that interweaves family secrets and public lies. Featuring a dozen characters in the person of actress performance artist Judith Sloan, this funny and haunting work traverses a Jewish family’s taboos, nervous breakthroughs, nuclear meltdowns, beauty school and an ever-expanding hole in the ozone layer. It is a chronicle of memory and transformation, based on Judith’s own coming to terms with the deaths of her father and grandmother when she was a young girl. Denial of the Fittest is a madcap look at the effects of whispers, silence and lies within a nuclear family and the nuclear secrets of a global family. Running time: one hour, twenty minutes. Workshop performances originally developed at La Mama ETC. It received critical acclaim at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has been produced in theaters, universities and conferences throughout the USA and in Canada. From the editors of the anthology From Memory To Transformation; Denial of the Fittest script included: “Judith Sloan is a superb performing artist who makes the personal into the political. She takes on the nuances of personal everyday life experiences and combines them with larger current world issues, plays with them and entices her audiences with biting insight and poignant realities. In her performance piece Denial of the Fittest, her protagonist must deal with the deceptions and secrets of her family and her own inner past before she can find her authentic identity.” Sarah Silberstein Swartz and Margie Wolfe.

Denial of the Fittest
Performed by Judith Sloan
Written by Judith Sloan in collaboration with Warren Lehrer. Directed by Lehrer.

To inquire about a performance CLICK HERE

A tattle tale

Judith Sloan portrays a muckraking southern woman with a sharp ironic wit, riding a roller coaster through an incestuous Mississippi legal system made up of frightening, odd and quirky characters. A Tattle Tale, the story of a teenage runaway, turned deputy sheriff, turned whistleblower, bears witness to coming of age in the face of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Inspired by the true story of Andrea Gibbs, who in 1989, sworn to uphold the law, blew the whistle on her superior officers for the brutal treatment of juvenile offenders in detention centers and prisons in Mississippi. In 1993, her efforts culminated in federal investigations and closings of prisons that were deemed “barbaric and unfit for human habitation.” Running time: one hour, fifteen minutes. Workshop performances originally developed at La Mama ETC. It premiered (1998) at Independent Performance Space at HERE, in New York, and has been produced in theaters, universities and conferences throughout the USA.

A Tattle Tale: Eyewitness in Mississippi
A play conceived and written by
Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan
Performed by Judith Sloan

To hear the play as performed on Democracy Now CLICK HERE

To hear the documentary by Laura Sydell and Judith Sloan that aired on National Public Radio  CLICK HERE

To inquire about a performance CLICK HERE

The Whole K’Cufin World

In an evening with Judith Sloan, anything can happen. Frustrated with not being able to say the F word on the radio while writing commentaries about Pat Buchanan, Sloan came up with an alternative word that would be FCC safe: K’Cufin, and embarked on a series of weekly radio commentaries with Warren Lehrer after Malachy Macourt asked Sloan to replace him on WBAI’s Talkback in 1994. Judith—who combines “fine acting that gives her performance depth and texture” (Variety), with “exquisite comic timing” (Indianapolis Star), “wickedly skewers stereotypes” (The Village Voice)—transforms into a myriad of characters in a full-length comic performance filled with laughter and tears. Judith’s character-driven monologues reveal the hypocrisy that lies beneath our information-glutted lives. Working in the comedic tradition of Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg, her characters challenge common assumptions about war and peace, women, generational struggle, gay and heterosexual relationships, and the ties that bind friends and family. Her monologues in this show are peppered with up-to-the-minute commentary on world affairs.

The Whole K’Cufin World and a few more things
Written and performed by Judith Sloan

To inquire about a performance CLICK HERE