The International Festival Of Arts & Ideas To Include Compagnia De' Colombari 20th Anniversary Season And More

Compagnia de' Colombari is celebrating 20 years of generating spectacle, disrupting and reconstructing texts and spaces under the direction of Karin Coonrod with a robust Anniversary Season throughout 2024.

Colombari productions are performed in multiple languages across the USA and Europe, with home bases in NYC and Italy (Orvieto and Venice). It aims to bring fresh interpretation to the written word and offer theatre accessible to everyone. For 2024, Coonrod focuses on radical theatrical adaptations of the works of William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Carlo Gozzi, and American author Flannery O'Connor (Coonrod carries the sole rights for theatrical adaptations from O'Connor's Estate). 

The 20th Anniversary Season began on January 22, 2024, with a documentary screening of A Gathering of Strangers: The Making of the Merchant in Venice at the McNally Amphitheatre at Fordham University about Colombari's production of Merchant performed in the 500-year-old Jewish Ghetto where the play takes place. On March 25, Colombari's WoW! (Whitman on Walls!) saluted the words of Walt Whitman and Italian and American poets in a bilingual multimedia event at Stony Brook University with readings by students, local poets and orators. 

The merry month of May brings three Colombari events, all FREE and open to the public. The first is WoW! (Whitman on Walls!) at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park in the Robert Frederick Smith Center for Performing Arts (679 Riverside Drive at 145th Street in Harlem) on May 5 at 6:30p.m. presented in partnership with New Heritage Theatre Group, Harlem Arts Alliance, Harlem Bomb Shelter, The City College of New York, and Impact Repertory Theatre. Envisioned as a “Slam Poetry reading meets movie screening,” WoW! Harlem features poets and artists, including Quincy Troupe, Alano Baez, Jose Perez with Paul Wellington on flute, Luther Isler, Alex Anderson, and Peter Gomez, among others, reacting to Whitman's “Song of Myself,” a “barbaric yawp” celebrating freedom, inclusion, and democracy. Working with this iconic piece, Colombari created seven short films with actors and musicians around the globe, bringing Whitman's words to life in startling and beautiful new ways intermixed with live responses from local poets and performers. This event continues Colombari's initiative to tour WoW! (Whitman on Walls!) in all 50 states in the USA by 2026, the 250th anniversary of The Declaration of Independence. All poems from WoW! events are collected and shared in an anthology. Volume I was published in September 2022, and Volume II will be published in December 2023.

The next event on May 6 at 6:30p.m. at Torn Page (435 West 22nd Street), Karin Coonrod passes the baton to the next generation of theatre makers, Colombari's Artistic Associates: Rory Pelsue (recipient of the 2023 NYSCA Support for Artists Theater Commissions Grant), Jesse Rasmussen, and Jacob Basri. Each of them will present selected scenes from classical productions in development. The theme of the evening is a cheeky reference to Coonrod as King Lear and the Artistic Associates as Lear's three daughters in anticipation of Colombari's world premiere of the play this June. (Space is limited; contact us for availability). 

A sneak peek “share-out” of KING LEAR rounds out the month on May 23 at 6:30p.m. at St. Paul's Church (234 Congress Street in Brooklyn). This celebratory “paper-crown” bacchanal showcases scenes from the play, introduces the public to the cast, staff and creative team, and explores the abundance of riches for Colombari's 20th Anniversary Season. Light refreshments will be served. FREE and open to the public with RSVP. RSVP HERE.

The world premiere of KING LEAR, Colombari's latest work directed by Karin Coonrod, debuts at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas on June 14-16 for five performances at the University Theatre (222 York Street, New Haven, CT). Tickets are available online HERE, from $48.31 to $79.18 (premium). Following its premiere, in late June through early July, Colombari's KING LEAR will perform in men's and women's prisons in New York State. A New York City debut and US and international touring are in the works. 

Compagnia de' Colombari's KING LEAR, adapted and directed by Karin Coonrod, is a raw, primal, and potent “paper crown” Lear that strips down the Shakespearian classic to its essence through a vigorous exploration of the text and characters' psyches and motivations. Utilizing Coonrod's signature “multiplicity” to shift and deepen audiences' connection with iconic characters, a diverse ensemble of ten actors each embodies King Lear initially. One by one, they strip off their paper crowns, transform into other characters, and conduct a radical take-over of the text and the theatre space. This fresh, vital, and urgent exploration of encountering oneself is a journey of a fractured soul and a broken community discovering wholeness through almost unbearable suffering.

In late July, Colombari's Italian Compagnia members will present an exploratory workshop of Il Mostro Turchino (The Blue Monster) by 18th-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi in Venice, Italy, in development for 2026. 

In September and October, Coonrod and Colombari will restage its theatrical adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge, a tragic-comic interracial seat-shifting dance between Blacks and whites on a bus in America's deep South. Eight actors morph into the characters, speaking and performing the original text verbatim from O'Connor's 1961 story about how all lives (classes, races, and religions) must eventually intersect. The show will tour Rome, Italy; Milwaukee, WI; Cleveland, OH; Houston, TX; Belmont, NC; and New York City.

About Compagnia de' Colombari:

Compagnia de' Colombari is an international collective of performing artists, generating theater in surprising places that springs from the vision of director Karin Coonrod. Colombari intentionally clashes cultures, traditions and art forms to bring fresh interpretations to the written word. It is founded on the twin principles that the magic of great theater can happen anywhere and be accessible to everyone. Compagnia de' Colombari was born in Orvieto, Italy, in 2004, when the company re-imagined medieval mystery plays and performed them in the streets and piazzas. Having revitalized the theater tradition during Orvieto's annual Corpus Christi Festival, Colombari launched a parallel theatrical experience in its New York City home base called Strangers & Other Angels. Since 2008, the company created and performed More Or Less I Am (from Whitman's "Song of Myself"), Everything That Rises Must Converge (from Flannery O'Connor's short story), The World Is Round Is Round Is Round (based on Gertrude Stein's story); Andras Visky's Giulia; Monteverdi's Orfeo; Karin Coonrod's texts&beheadings/ElizabethR; Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in Venice, Italy; WoW! (Whitman on Walls!) a hybrid of the More Or Less I Am films with local active poets reciting their work around the country and worldwide, King Lear, debuting in 2024, Il Mostro Turchino (The Blue Monster, by Carlo Gozzi), in development in Venice, Italy for a 2026 premiere.

About Karin Coonrod:

Karin Coonrod is a director, writer, and teacher whose work has been seen and heard across the US and worldwide. The New York Times calls her ”a theater artist of far-reaching inventiveness”…using a “style that deconstructs to construct.” Most recently, she created a hybrid piece, Whitman on Walls! mingling films with living poets on tour throughout the USA and UK, and continuing (2021-2026); The Merchant of Venice in the Jewish Ghetto in Venice (IT), a high-security men's prison in Padova (IT) and on tour in the US (2016-2018); Babette's Feast in Portland, Maine and Off-Broadway (2018); her own texts&beheadings/ElizabethR at the Folger Theater in Washington DC, BAM/Next Wave Fest and a women's prison (2015-2017). Other notable productions include Shakespeare's Henry VI and Love's Labor's Lost (Public Theater 1996+2011, where she was Artist-in-Residence in 1995-1996); King John and Julius Caesar (Theater for a New Audience, 2000+2003); Hamlet (California Shakespeare, 2000); The Tempest (La Mama Theatre 2014); and Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York Theatre Workshop 2001, subsequently toured to Rome and around the USA and into Manhattan DOC, 2009-present); Monteverdi's Orfeo (Palazzo Simoncelli in Orvieto, Italy 2014); Pirandello's Enrico IV (American Repertory Theatre 2001); Euripides' Phoenician Women (performed with ART students at the Moscow Art Theater in 2008). Founding Director of Compagnia de' Colombari (2004-now), an international company that performed Strangers & Other Angels (medieval mystery plays re-imagined for the 21st century in the streets of Orvieto, Italy 2004-2006) that launched a new tradition of theater in the streets of Orvieto. Coonrod has been on Yale's David Geffen School of Drama faculty since 2002. A book about The Transnational Theatre of Karin Coonrod is in development for a 2025 release and under contract with Bloomsbury Press (UK) editors. 

Compagnia de' Colombari's 20th Anniversary Season programs are made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), The Eucalyptus Foundation, and the generous support from other funders and donors.