The Civilians 20th Anniversary Gala to Honor Mia Katigbak and Les Waters

The Civilians (Steve Cosson, Artistic Director; Margaret Moll, Managing Director), the award-winning New York-based theater company, will honor actor-manager and co-founder of NAATCO Mia Katigbak and Obie Award-winning director and arts leader Les Waters at The Civilians 20th Anniversary Gala Concert. The event, which takes place on Monday, May 23 at 6:30pm at City Winery (25 11th Ave), will celebrate two decades of creative investigation into the richness and complexity of life.

The gala concert will feature inspiring stories and songs from The Civilians' 20-year history, including original music composed just for the event by Fabian Obispo, Martha Redbone and Aaron Whitby, and wide-ranging numbers written by various composers including founding company member Michael Friedman. Performers will be announced at a later date.

At the event, The Civilians will present their Civilians of the Year awards to Waters, the award-winning director and past Artistic Director of Actors Theatre of Louisville; and Katigbak, actor-manager and co-founder of NAATCO (National Asian American Theatre Company). Katigbak and Waters most recently collaborated on the world premiere of Out of Time, a collection of five new monologues by five award-winning Asian American Playwrights. It was conceived and directed by Waters, commissioned by NAATCO, and co-produced with The Public Theater.

The Co-Chairs of the 20th Anniversary Artist Committee are Marsha Stephanie Blake, Kathleen Chalfant, Anne Kauffman, Kyle Jarrow, Jennifer R. Morris, Dael Orlandersmith, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Duncan Sheik.

"I am honored and delighted that The Civilians 20th Anniversary Gala Concert will celebrate two extraordinary artists, Les Waters and Mia Katigbak," said The Civilians Artistic Director Steve Cosson. "Both are beloved figures in the American theater, and each has a special relationship with The Civilians. Les Waters is that rare director who manages to be both a visionary auteur and a true collaborator. Each of his productions expresses his unique sensibility, there is something unmistakably "Les" in each moment of his shows. It's no surprise that Mia Katigbak and Les are friends and collaborators. I find Mia's acting much like Les' productions. Both of them can create seismic emotional events, without showing the effort. I am also so happy to celebrate her accomplishments as the leader of NAATCO, one of this city's absolutely essential theater companies."

In addition, The Civilians, in collaboration with the company's creative community, will offer a special Artist Auction comprised of one-of-a-kind experiences audiences can enjoy or give as a gift.

Individual tickets to The Civilians 20th Anniversary Gala Concert start at $500 with tables available starting at $2,500. Tickets can be purchased online at thecivilians.org, by calling 718-230-3330 or by emailing dan@thecivilians.org.

Please visit www.thecivilians.org for more information.

About the Honorees

Mia Katigbak is the co-founder and actor-manager of the award-winning, New York City based NAATCO (National Asian American Theatre Company). She is a USA Fellow (2021) and TCG's 2017 Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellow for Distinguished Achievement. Other awards include a Special Drama Desk Award (2019), the Actors Equity Foundation's St. Clair Bayfield for Best Supporting Role in a Shakespeare Play; Otto René Castillo Award for Political Theater; NYIT for Artistic Achievement; the Lily Award for Trailblazing; an Obie for performance (in NAATCO's Awake and Sing!); the Lucille Lortel and the Lee Reynolds Awards (League of Professional Theatre Women); the Actors Equity's Rosetta LeNoire Award; New Dramatists' Charles Bowden Actor Award; and a Distinguished Award for Artistic Excellence from Ma-Yi Theater. She was selected by nytheatre.com as one of their People of the Year in 2007.

She is a founding director of CAATA (Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists) and served as the president of its first board. She was one of the organizers of the 1st and 2nd National Asian American Theater Festivals in 2007 and 2009 in New York City. She was the curator of NYU's Festival of Voices (2018).

She has acted extensively with NAATCO, most recently in the world premiere of Out of Time, US premiere of Caryl Churchill's What If If Only, a remote live production, and Henry VI, Shakespeare's Trilogy in Two Parts. Selected productions include Russian Troll Farm, an on-line, live-edited play co-produced by TheaterWorks (CT), TheatreSquared (AR), and The Civilians (NY); The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Transport Group); Recent Alien Abductions (PlayCo); Dear Elizabeth (WP); Ivo van Hove's Scenes From a Marriage (NYTW); Good Person of Szechwan (Foundry/Public Theater). Other NYC: LCT3, Soho Rep, WP, New Georges, New Group, Ma-Yi, Target Margin, Clubbed Thumb, Bushwick Starr, Intar, Pan Asian Rep. Regional work: Yale Rep and Long Wharf (CT), the Humana Festival at the Actors Theater in Louisville (KY), Two River Theater (NJ), Berkeley Rep (CA), Swine Palace (LA), and the Guthrie (MN). International: Manila, Philippines and Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Television credits include "How to Get Away With Murder" (ABC), "The Sinner" (USA), "Chicago PD" (NBC), "Mysteries of Laura" (NBC), and "Conviction" (NBC). Her film credits include I Smile Back, Clutter, and Slow Jam King.

She has served in panels for the theatre programs of the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Nancy Quinn Fund for Emerging Theaters and the Fund for Small Theaters (both administered by ART/NY), and the Asian American Arts Alliance. She has been a guest speaker for forums sponsored by the New York Times, the Humana Festival, and Theater Communications Group. She holds a BA from Barnard College and an MA from Columbia University.

Les Waters is an Obie Award winning director, whose productions have been seen on Broadway (DANA H., IN THE NEXT ROOM, OR THE VIBRATOR PLAY) off-Broadway, and regionally. Recent collaborations with Lucas Hnath include THE THIN PLACE (Playwrights Horizons, Actors Theatre of Louisville) and DANA H. (Vineyard Theatre/CTG/Goodman Theatre), for which he won an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Direction. Les' work includes productions at NAATCO, Playwrights Horizons, Signature Theatre Company, The Public Theater, Second Stage Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Connelly Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Soho Rep, and Brooklyn Academy of Music, and regionally at theatres such as Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Arena Stage, Huntington Theatre Company, Mark Taper Forum, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, and American Repertory Theater. Les was Artistic Director of Actors Theatre of Louisville from 2012-2018, where he directed EVOCATION OF VISIBLE APPEARANCE, LITTLE BUNNY FOO FOO, RECENT ALIEN ABDUCTIONS, MACBETH, FOR PETER PAN ON HER 7OTH BIRTHDAY, THE GLORY OF THE WORLD, Luna GALE, AT THE VANISHING POINT, THE CHRISTIANS, OUR TOWN, GNIT, GIRLFRIEND, LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, and BIG LOVE (Obie Award Special Citation, 2002). From 2003-2011, he served as Associate Artistic Director at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. He led the MFA directing program at University of California, San Diego from 1995-2003. He is both the subject and co-author of The Theatre of Les Waters: More Like the Weather, edited by Scott T. Cummings, to be published by Routledge, in April 2022

About The Civilians

The Civilians began in 2001 with a company of artists, led by Founding Artistic Director Steve Cosson, who were interested in making new work at the intersection of the theatrical and the real. We took our name from old vaudeville slang-a "civilian" being anyone outside of show business-and we coined the term "investigative theater" to describe our combination of a creative process with field research and in-depth residencies. This approach would yield numerous revelatory, exuberant and critically acclaimed new plays and musicals, many in collaboration with founding member Michael Friedman. After Michael's passing in 2017, the company launched The Michael Friedman Recording Project with Ghostlight Records, creating cast albums of his unrecorded shows.

Select Civilians shows include Gone Missing, with several US and UK tours culminating in a one-year Off-Broadway commercial run; This Beautiful City, about the politicized Evangelical movement; The Great Immensity, the first major American play about climate change; José Rivera's Another Word for Beauty, created from a residency inside Bogotá's national women's prison during their annual beauty pageant; and Michael Friedman and Bess Wohl's Pretty Filthy created from immersion in L.A.'s adult film industry. The Civilians created several original works while serving as the first theater company to be artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The company also has a rich history of nurturing new work by some of America's leading playwrights and composers, such as Anne Washburn's Mr Burns, a post-electric play, which has gone on to hundreds of subsequent productions around the world and was recently named the fourth best play of the past twenty-five years by The New York Times. The company sustains a number of artistic programs including new work development, a cabaret series for new musicals, the R&D Group new work lab, the online journal Extended Play, and more.