New Ohio Theatre & IRT Theater Announce Archive Alliance Residency

The New Ohio Theatre and IRT Theater (neighbors in the historic Archive Building on Christopher Street) have announced their exciting new initiative: beginning this Fall, the Archive Alliance Residency is offering select independent theatre companies a two-year commitment of space, artistic support, and institutional continuity for the development and presentation of a new work. In other words, a home.

The residency includes two separate engagements in IRT’s 3B Development Series, and a one-week presentation in New Ohio’s OBIE Award-winning Ice Factory summer festival. The residency culminates in the second year with a fully realized, four-week run in the New Ohio’s main season. Next Fall they will invite two more companies, bringing the program to full strength with four companies, each cycling through the two-year residency.

This partnership between the New Ohio Theatre and IRT Theater will further establish the West Village’s Archive Building as one of the premier destinations for the development and presentation of NYC’s best and brightest theater-makers.

Their first two resident companies are The Mad Ones and CollaborationTown. Both companies develop work collaboratively within their ensembles, and both had popular and critical successes at the New Ohio last season:

The Mad Ones’ Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War: “A masterful lo-fi goof on sci-fi doom, slyly combining postapocalyptic cold-war kitsch and cracker-barrel nostalgia with a beautiful, bleak, bare-bones love story…This is one of the most smoothly functional theatrical metaphors you’ll have seen in a while, a great, small play about decline and denial and the subtler, unspoken bonds of devotion,” said New York Magazine.

CollaborationTown’s The Deepest Play Ever: The Catharsis of Pathos: “Talent thrives among its tattered decadence,” said The New York Times.

The New Ohio and IRT will kick-off their new Archive Alliance Residency with an evening of cocktails, excerpts, and conversation with The Mad Ones and CollaborationTown on Monday, October 8 at 7pm at the New Ohio Theatre, located at 154 Christopher Street between Greenwich and Washington Streets in the West Village.