Tag: Nicole Greevy

“Before & After” Part 2: Carl M. Banks and Nicole Greevy (Episode 80)

Give a listen to the second half of our first-ever student matinee, performed at the beautiful Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Symphony Space on March 13, 2025. Listen to Part 1 here.

The fantastic Najah Imani Muhammad hosted the show for a theater full of high school juniors from Global Learning Collaborative and Talent Unlimited High School to help inspire the personal stories they want to tell in their college application essays.

Story partners Carl M. Banks and Nicole Greevy embodied the low and high notes of each other’s musical true tales, captivating our student audience with both story and song.

Thank you to NYSCA-A.R.T./New York Creative Opportunity Fund (A Statewide Theatre Regrant Program) for helping us make our first-ever student matinee a reality. Here’s to what we hope is the first of many!

Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Podcast narrated by Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons.

Stories

  • “Carl’s Lucky Dollar,” by Carl M. Banks, performed by Nicole Greevy, and directed by KJ Fitzsimmons.
  • “Of Axes and Tree Surgeons,” by Nicole Greevy, performed by Carl M. Banks, and directed by KJ Fitzsimmons.

Bios

Carl M. Banks is a troubadour and musical nomad. Born in the heartland of Saint Louis, Missouri, he found his rhythm in the bustling streets of New York City, now calling Astoria, Queens, his home.  Traversing the country as a touring singer-songwriter, his lyrics and melodies echo the highs and lows of the American landscape while his stories touch on personal and profound narratives. He has been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and WFUV’s local artist spotlight, “New York Slice.” Carl is also an ultra-marathon runner and co-creator of Queens-based “Bridge and a Slice Half Marathon” and “HotDog Eater 50 kilometer.”

Nicole Greevy is a playwright and actor and is thrilled to be returning to No, YOU Tell It! You can read one of her previous pieces, “Nerd: The Next Generation,” in the No, YOU Tell It! Ten-Year Anthology. She is a New York State Council of the Arts 2025 grant recipient for playwriting. If you love her dulcet tones today, you can hear her as Sheriff Rowland, and many others, on the award-winning fiction podcast Uncanny County, where she contributes as both performer and writer.

Meet Our “Before & After” Storytellers

Our first story meeting for our first student matinee is tonight! But FIRST, meet our “Before & After” alum storytellers.

These four storytellers participated in four different NYTI shows over the past decade. They are meeting tonight to help each other develop their true tales inspired by the theme “Before & After” on the page.

On March 13, they will swap stories on stage for students and faculty from Global Learning Collaborative High School.

Meet our NYTI alums!

We’re excited to build our creative community by having alum storytellers return and trade tales with a new story partner!

These matinees for students working on their college essays are a dynamic example of how the No, YOU Tell It! collaborative process makes writing and performing personal narratives accessible, empathetic, and transformative.

We hope to do more student shows and are raising $2500 in March to make that happen.

If 50 people donate $50, we’ll reach our goal! Want to be one?

Donate $50 here via our fiscal sponsor, The Field, to get the ball rolling.

Want to see this special show at Symphony Space at 1 pm on March 13? Email noyoutellit@gmail.com for a ticket!

Episode 68 – Legacy Anthology Reboot

In anticipation of our forthcoming ten-year anthology from Palm Circle Press, we are flashing back to 2014 when we participated in The Brick’s Comic Book Theater Festival in Brooklyn.

For this show, we tried something new. Usually, we give our storytellers a theme to inspire their true tales. This time, we only provided the theme “Legacy” to comic artist Sha-Née Williams and asked her to interpret it into a visual prompt. Then we gave this image to our storytellers without the word “Legacy” or any further context.

After they completed their first drafts, Sha-Née joined our story meetings and drew unique illustrations for each of their true tales. In spite of the fact that we didn’t share the theme, our storytellers ended up thinking about the personal legacies we leave behind. Give a listen to the results and don’t forget to follow us on Insta @noyoutellit to check out more of Sha-Née’s “Legacy” artwork

Top left: Sha-Née Williams and Nicole Greevy with “Nerd: The Next Generation” artwork. Bottom left: Sha-Née’s “Legacy” image. Bottom right: E. James Ford with “League of Absence” artwork by Sha-Née Williams.

 

Stories were performed live on June 8th, 2014 at The Brick:

“League of Absencewritten by E. James Ford and performed by Nicole Greevy.

“Nerd: The Next Generation written by Nicole Greevy and performed by E. James Ford.