Culture Project to Present Danny Hoch's Till the Break of Dawn

Culture Project will present the world premiere of Till the Break of Dawn, a new play written and directed by hip-hop theater icon Danny Hoch. The 11-character play begins performances September 4 at the Abrons Arts Center on Manhattan's Lower East Side and will open on September 13 for an eight-week limited engagement.

Till the Break of Dawn is being billed as the first commercial production of hip-hop in straight-play form, from one of the pioneers of the field. Hoch founded the Hip-Hop Theater Festival in 2000. Till the Break of Dawn is Hoch's first new written work to be presented in New York since 1998, when he received a Drama Desk nomination for his one-man show Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop.

In Till the Break of Dawn, Gibran, an internet hip-hop activist, leads a group of his New York friends on a trip to Havana to attend a festival. They've always been radical at home, but in Cuba, radical means something else. So does hip-hop, and so do they. Casting for the Culture Project production will be announced shortly.

Hoch founded the Hip-Hop Theater Festival in 2000, which has presented over 75 hip-hop generation plays from around the world . He also sits on the board of the Theatre Communications Group and is the 2007 Sundance Theatre Lab's Playwright-In-Residence. Hoch's writing and acting credits for television and film include Lucky You, Bamboozled, Washington Heights, Prison Song, Subway Stories, Thin Red Line, Whiteboys, Blackhawk Down, American Splendor, War Of The Worlds and HBO's Def Poetry. The HBO version of his Drama Desk-nominated one-man show Some People received a Cable Ace Award Nomination and the film version of Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop, recently released on DVD, received an Urbanworld Film Festival Award.