Marvell Rep, which presented an impressive inaugural New York season in 2011, has announced its 2012 repertory season devoted to provocative and incendiary plays that have been burned, banned and caused riots.
Marvell Repertory Theatre is New York's only professional theatre
(and one of only a handful in the US) devoted exclusively to producing new and enduring works in revolving repertory.
Lenny Leibowitz, Marvell Rep’s Artistic Director, said: “All of the plays this season are theatrical firestorms; they have had controversial lives and they remain provocative to this day. They are also vibrant, subversive mixtures that bristle with humanity and big ideas. These writers -- whose work has often been neglected or forgotten because it was censored -- created gutsy, playful, subversive works, and we are thrilled to present them altogether in one season.”
“I adore the works of Arthur Schnitzler, the great Austro-Hungarian Jewish doctor and writer, diagnostician of the soul, frenemy of Freud, and the one of the most neglected of the great masters. Peter Schnitzler, Arthur's grandson, suggested “Professor Bernhardi” which he considered his grandfather's masterpiece. It had been banned for so long that it was almost forgotten. It was censored, first by the Austrians prior to its premiere in 1912; then by the Nazis during World War II. The play was produced in New York during the early part of the 20th Century by the German-speaking theatre at Irving Place, and was first produced in English in London in 1936 in a production directed by Arthur Schnitzler's son (and Peter's father), Heinrich, but a planned 1938 Broadway production was scrapped. It is a brilliant play of Shakespearean magnitude: gripping, mysterious, elusive, and profound, and I am delighted we are producing the first English production in New York.
“While searching for a musical for our 2012 season, Occupy Wall Street began to capture national and international attention. We realized, if there has ever been a time for Brecht, and particularly for Threepenny, it's now. “The Threepenny Opera” is just as radical today as it was when the Nazis banned it, and it still astonishes with its combination of filth and grandeur, savagery and charm.
“I love the perverse beauty and amorality of "Spring's Awakening". The hit Broadway musical made the title very familiar, but not many people know Frank Wedekind’s amazing play, which is more subversive than the musical. It captures without sentimentality the beauty, the cruelty, and the mystery of being young. The kids in the play aren’t just victims of bad parenting; they can be self-indulgent amoralists. On its New York premiere in 1917, the courts ordered “Spring's Awakening” to be shut down because of its ‘pornographic’ content, and as recently as 1986 a Toronto audience walked out on the play because of its ‘obscenity.’”
“Our 2011 pairing two short plays, “Nora” and “In the Shadow of the Glen”, was great fun and well-received. When we discovered O’Neill’s “Exorcism” in The New Yorker this fall -- this electrifying one-act that contained the seeds of all of O'Neill's greatest works, that no one had seen or even read since 1920 when O'Neill ordered every copy burned -- we knew we had to do it. It is a journey into O’Neill’s inferno, but it’s ultimately a redemptive and very hopeful play.
“We decided to pair it with Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance,” a play about a Jewish brothel owner who longs to give his daughter, his only child, a respectable life. And it features the world’s first onstage lesbian kiss, which got the original Broadway cast (1923) thrown in jail on obscenity charges.”
Artistic Director Lenny Leibowitz and Managing Director Amy Estes founded Marvell Repertory Theatre in 2010 with the intention of giving New York theatre actors and audiences the kind of full-immersion theatre experience that only rotating rep can provide. While running New Harmony Theatre from 2006 to 2010 they successfully developed an annual repertory project which led them to launch Marvell Repertory Theatre.
LENNY LEIBOWITZ has directed at some of the nation's leading regional and Off-Broadway theatres, including the Olney Theatre, the National Players, and New Harmony Theatre, where he was Artistic Director from 2006 to 2010. His New York credits include the world premiere of Making Tracks, which was workshopped at The Public Theatre and ran Off-Broadway at Rockefeller Center's Taipei Theater. Other regional theatre credits include the Huntington Theatre's Breaking Ground Festival (Boston), and Seattle's Intiman Theatre, where he co-wrote, developed and directed an early version of his musical Before the Rain as the recipient of a Freehold grant. He received his B.A. from Columbia University and his M.F.A. from Boston University, where he was also a member of the conservatory faculty. He is a member of the Society of Directors and Choreographers and Actors' Equity Association.
