Entertainment

Look up, way up: It’s theater on high

There are plenty of places in this town where you can see Tony-winning actors perform.

A roof isn’t usually one of them.

That changes this weekend, when the Red Shirt Rooftop Reading Series features “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Caroline, or Change” star Tonya Pinkins in one of nine short new works performed al fresco, on a rooftop on West 23rd Street.

The three-day fest is the brainchild of Red Shirt Entertainment, a year-old producing company whose office is under that roof. Artistic director Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj says the group’s goal is to give “these wonderful emerging playwrights a platform to be heard.”

And a fairly high-up one, at that.

Maharaj says the series was inspired by similar performances in Harlem in the 1950s and ’60s, when not every building boasted air conditioning. Red Shirt’s built a makeshift stage, five floors above street level, underneath an overhang that will project the sound toward the audience rather than the sky.

If it rains, as it threatens to do constantly this summer, the action will be moved to a conference room indoors that can seat up to 70 people.

For Ione Lloyd, whose “Goddess Hair and Nail Salon” — a modern-day riff on the rape of Medusa, set in a Brooklyn hair salon — the festival is “a blessing.”

“Many companies, if they don’t know your name or you didn’t go to an Ivy League school, they don’t really care,” says Lloyd, 35, who was homeless from her teenage years into her 20s. “But Red Shirt looked at the script and were able to see the real me.”

Pinkins also saw something in the playwright. Intrigued by Lloyd’s “Little Louise” — a drama about the madam of a 1930s brothel, presented this winter at the East Village’s Kraine Theater — the actress sought her out, and the two have since become friends. So Pinkins didn’t hesitate when Lloyd asked her to participate in the Red Shirt series.

“I’ve spent my entire career pretty much doing new works by new writers,” Pinkins points out.

Other works in the program include Stephen Mo Hanan’s “Everybody Into the Gene Pool,” with a soul about to incarnate a human body, and Desi Moreno-Penson’s “Reconcile, Bitch,” about two hipsters struggling to get back together.

All that and more will, with any luck, be played out under the stars.

“We want people to really appreciate the beauty of the city,” says Maharaj. “The skyline is so beautiful, and we too seldom use our rooftops as performance spaces.”

The Red Shirt Rooftop Reading Series runs tonight through Sunday at 18 W. 23rd St. Tickets, $10, at redshirtentertainment.com.