8:00PM
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
APRIL 4th Thru APRIL 28th

The smash hit of the 2000 Nada EdFest returns for ONE MONTH ONLY!

Written by EDWARD D. WOOD, JR.
Adapted and Directed by FRANK CWIKLIK
Produced by
MICHELE SCHLOSSBERG-CWIKLIK
and
FRANK CWIKLIK

nytheatre.com Editor Martin Denton recently interviewed Frank Cwiklick
(director/writer)

CLICK HERE

THE FUGITIVE GIRLS! is a dark, wild action comedy
adapted from one of the last works of notorious cult director Edward D. Wood. Jr..

The DMTheatrics adaptation of this film played in the Masterworks of Ed Wood festival at the late Todo Con Nada in Summer of 2000 to sellout houses and rabid audience response. Ed Wood's obscure sexploitation cult favorite presents four deadly women and their desperate bid for freedom, as they rape, pillage and plunder their way through late-60s America. Sex, violence, pop culture, and shocking ugliness await you in this gruesome, shocking, brutally entertaining bad girl action comedy featuring psychotic hippies, swinging bachelors, crazed veterans, toothless hicks, sex, guns, drugs, and rock and roll, and one of the ugliest and most unsettling climaxes this side of a snuff movie.

THE PLOT: Dee Wood, a naive young waitress, is sentenced to a minimum security women's prison after being framed by her boyfriend for a botched liquor store holdup. In prison, she is seduced by Cat, tough as nails leader of the meanest girl gang on the cell block - including Paula, a hard-drinking, bar-brawling lesbian; and Toni, a sultry, man-eating Southern belle. Toni has a stash of green hidden in an abandoned factory over the state line, and Cat and Paula aim to break out of prison along with her to claim it. Like it or not, Dee is along for the ride. After escaping, the girls tear a violent, bloody path through the American South, beating the hell out of hippies, swinging bachelors, gas station attendants, and Hell's Angels.

In Photo: Michele Schlossberg photograph by FRANK CWIKLIK To view full size image: Click HERE

STARRING - Danielle Daggerty, Bob Laine, Ian W. Hill, Christian Koop,
Jackie Payne, Michele Schlossberg, Sarah Jane Bunker and Josh Mertz

BIOGRAPHIES

FRANK CWIKLIK

MICHELE SCHLOSSBERG-CWIKLIK

EDWARD D. WOOD, JR (1924-1978)

BIOGRAPHIES

FRANK CWIKLIK, Artistic Director of DMTheatrics, has been hailed by The Village Voice as "a tireless theatrical impresario... an obvious talent (who) takes his work beyond moving and into the real"; by Time Out New York as "the campiest and most enjoyable of...directors"; and by NYTheatre.com as "a director of budding brilliance... I can't wait to see what he does next." He has been working steadily in Off-Off-Broadway Independent Theater since 1999, when his cult comedy, Girls' School Vampire, premiered at the Greenwich Street Playhouse. The show returned in Halloween of that year at the legendary Todo Con NADA, where he began his long collaboration with downtown theater legend Ian W. Hill, whose guidance helped DMTheatrics rapidly build a huge repertory and a dedicated following. His massive Ed Wood Festival staged eight of the screen iconoclast's classic works; the apocalyptic S&M mutant Shakespeare, Bitch Macbeth, ran to sellout houses and rave reviews.

MICHELE SCHLOSSBERG-CWIKLIK has been the Managing Director of DMTheatrics since January, 2000. After her first year at the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts she was thrown out of the Academy and went to study at Oxford University in the even more prestigious and considerably more fun Midsummer at Oxford Program. After meeting her husband Frank Cwiklik in 1999, she directed and performed in over 11 productions with DMTheatrics, and has worked with Ian W. Hill, creator of Gemini collision works and former Artistic Director of Todo Con Nada. In 2001-2002 season, she will reprise her role as Cat in The Fugitive Girls!.

EDWARD D. WOOD, JR (1924-1978) was willing to work anywhere, on anything, especially near the end of his brief, tragic life. He was no stranger to the seamy side of show business he had worked in carnivals as a young man, and frequented burlesque and striptease houses throughout his life. After unsuccessful attempts to make a name for himself in cinema and theater, all of which left him broke, directionless, and despondent, his friend and drinking buddy Stephen Apostolof, better known as A.C. Stephens, was the only daredevil willing to risk Ed's booze-fueled unreliability by hiring him for film projects. Stephensâ forte was nudie exploitation flicks, churned out for grindhouses, drive-ins, and stag distributors, and so that's just what Ed gave him. Their most interesting collaboration, The Fugitive Girls!, was the last completed project of Ed's long, sad career, and is notable for its typically Wood-ish twisted feminism, inhabiting a surreal, comical world of impotent and boorish men and tough, self-determined women. Ed himself also created the filmâs memorably slapdash trailer, dubbed several character voices in the finished film, and (over)played the role of Pops, the beleaguered gas station attendant. While his salary for the film barely covered his whiskey budget, it did lead to several relatively lucrative novelizations for the pulp paperback market, which Ed was startlingly prolific in, recycling the filmâs plot, characters, and situations numerous times in a series of shamelessly similar "novels". Ed was guilelessly proud of these books, and the film (though he would have preferred to direct it himself, an impossible task for the physically crumbling alcoholic and chainsmoker), and it shows in the perverse and almost sadistic glee the script takes in skewering every sacred cow in its path. Though The Fugitive Girls! remains among the most obscure of Ed's works, the "classic" Ed films, including Plan Nine From Outer Space, Glen or Glenda, and Bride of the Monster, have come to be cult classics, first derided, then reevaluated, and now accepted as an endearing and fascinating example of "outsider" - style cinema, a phenomenon sadly unknown to Ed, who died alone and penniless in a friendâs apartment while watching a football game shortly before Christmas 1978.