Mabou Mines Announces Winter/Spring 2022 Season Culminating In A Four-Day 50th Anniversary Celebration

Mabou Mines today announces its Winter/Spring 2022 season, with the iconic company re-engaging its past to celebrate its 50th anniversary-and presenting new work that continues to vitally push the boundaries of theatrical experience.

Founded by JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow-and currently under the co-artistic direction of Mallory Catlett, Sharon Ann Fogarty, Karen Kandel, and Carl Hancock Rux-Mabou Mines has continued across a half-century to uphold an artist-led, collective, evolving, and multitudinous vision of theater's flexibility to interpretation and experimentation.

This legacy expands this year, with preview performances of The Vicksburg Project, a years-long collaboration between composer Eve Beglarian and Mabou Mines co-artistic directors Karen Kandel and Mallory Catlett, examining the history of racial pain in this country through stories from the titular Mississippi city; with the company's new interpretations of 60 past works they've produced, re-explored for New York audiences across a 4-day 50th Anniversary Marathon of readings; and with the return of JoAnne Akalaitis' productions honoring playwright and director María Irene Fornés's style and artistic spirit in her pairing of MUD and Philip Glass's operatic interpretation of the short work Drowning, presented as part of The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival.

MUD/Drowning (a play / an opera)

By María Irene Fornés

Directed by JoAnne Akalaitis

With Music by Philip Glass

Co-Presented by The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, Mabou Mines, and Weathervane Productions

January 12-15, 18-22, 25-29 at 7:30pm, January 16, 23, & 30 at 5pm

At Mabou Mines

150 1st Avenue, New York, NY

and

The Rest I Make Up

Documentary Film Screening

Directed by Michelle Memran

Co-Presented by The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, Mabou Mines, and Weathervane Productions

January 15, 22

At Mabou Mines

150 1st Avenue, New York, NY

Mabou Mines' and Weathervane Productions' unique celebration of the legendary, late playwright and director María Irene Fornés-a pairing of Philip Glass' transformation of her five-page play Drowning into an opera and a version of her acclaimed play MUD, both directed by Mabou Mines founding artist JoAnne Akalaitis-returns as part of The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival. These intimate productions, both with new music composed by Glass, were first presented at Mabou Mines in February, 2020, following performances of earlier versions in 2019 at the Circle Theatre in Carmel, CA, as part of the Days and Nights Festival. They build upon a recent outpouring of recognition of Fornés' work that began with an Akalaitis-produced marathon of her plays at The Public Theater in August 2018 and continued with the acclaimed Theatre for a New Audience production of Fornés' landmark Fefu and Her Friends, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, in the fall of 2019.

For both works, Akalaitis and her collaborators have developed an aesthetic and philosophical framework to honor the homemade quality of many of Fornés' own stagings-a "production style that understood just how profound stillness, sparseness, and playful humor could be" (Los Angeles Times). Akalaitis describes these works as "a conversation between the actors, design, the music, the singers, and of course the primary conversationalist in all this is Irene. They are seemingly stylistically very different-with the quotidien atmosphere and language of MUD and the monstrosity of the characters and opaqueness of the poetry in Drowning-but the heartbeat of both these pieces is in the same body."

The director, who won an Obie Award for these performances, notes that Fornés "is also known as La Maestra-the teacher of a generation of playwrights. She creates worlds within worlds and then hurls audiences headlong into them: rural poverty, secret brutality in the center of banal households, angry eccentric women, violence and humiliation, sexual obsession-and often through the voices of those who dream of a more fulfilled life or love, articulating their longin gs in Fornés' beautiful, terse, emotional language, which is both highly stylized and surprisingly natural."

Drowning, Fornés' little-known surreal short play, written in 1986, has found a new voice in Philip Glass' "pocket opera," which ignites its unconventional spark into a small glowing fire. In The Telegraph, Philip Glass has described his "pocket operas"-a form for which he has a continued fondness-as "pieces for just a few singers and players." Drowning features Tomás Cruz as Stephen, Gregory Purnhagen as Pea, and Peter Stewart as Roe. Michael A. Ferrara will be playing keyboard, and Brandee Younger will play the harp.

MUD, Fornés' 1983 masterpiece, gives voice to those at the "bottom" of society with a surge of humor, compassion, and magical lyricism. The performances at Mabou Mines feature Paul Lazar as Lloyd, Bruce MacVittie as Henry, and Wendy vanden Heuvel as Mae.

The MUD/Drowning creative team includes Kaye Voyce (Scenic and Costume Designer), Thomas Dunn (Lighting Designer), and Gabrielle Vincent (Makeup Designer).

Performances take place January 12-15, 18-22, 25-29 at 7:30pm, January 16, 23, & 30 at 5pm at Mabou Mines, 150 1st Avenue, New York, NY. Tickets start at $24, plus fees, and Public Supporter and Partner tickets start at $20, no fees.

Ticket access begins at 12PM ET November 29 for Public Theater Partner & Supporter Plus tickets, and December 1 for Team Public, along with all other general tickets.

MUD/Drowning will be presented alongside the documentary The Rest I Make Up (January 15, 22), directed by Michelle Memran, co-presented by The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, Mabou Mines, and Weathervane Productions. Memran's documentary offers a deeper understanding of the world of María Irene Fornés, one of America's greatest playwrights and most influential teachers (who still remains largely unknown). The film follows the visionary Cuban-American dramatist-who constructed astonishing worlds onstage and pioneered NYC's Off-Off-Broadway Theater Movement, writing over 40 plays and winning nine Obie Awards-after she gradually stopped writing due to dementia. Her unexpected friendship with Memran reignites her spontaneous creative spirit and triggers a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off. "Above all, the movie embodies Fornés's inherently and irrepressibly creative presence," wrote Richard Brody in The New Yorker, in which he named it one of "The Best Movies of 2018." He adds, "The text alone, transcribed, would be a primer in live-wire poetic lucidity."

Screenings for The Rest I Make Up take place January 15 & 22 at Mabou Mines, 150 1st Avenue, New York, NY.

The Vicksburg Project

Preview Performances

Conceived by Composer Eve Beglarian

Created in Collaboration with Karen Kandel (Performer/Writer)

and Mallory Catlett (Director)

Co-Produced by Mabou Mines and piece by piece productions

Performances May 11- 15, May 18 - 23, May 25 - 29

At Mabou Mines

150 First Avenue, New York, NY 10009

A staged cycle of interlocked songs conceived by composer Eve Beglarian and created in collaboration with Mabou Mines Co-Artistic Directors Karen Kandel (performer/writer) and Mallory Catlett (director), The Vicksburg Project traces women's and transgender people's experiences in Vicksburg, Mississippi in four different eras. Spanning the Civil War 1860s, the Jim Crow/Great Migration 1910s, the Civil Rights 1960s, and the current decade, The Vicksburg Project evokes the intersections of race and gender in America through deeply researched and resurrected stories from everyday life in one small city. Preview presentations at Mabou Mines in May, 2022 will lead to the work's premiere at Harlem Stage in January, 2023.

The temporal panorama of Vicksburg sets place-and the multitudes of both trauma and growth it can contain-to genre-and-time crossing song, performed by Karen Kandel and vocalists Andrea Jones-Sojola and Megan Schubert and a string ensemble. A white woman writing in a diary about her time living in a cave to protect her besieged slave-holding lifestyle; an enslaved woman for whom no first person written accounts exist; a Union soldier who lived life as a man, before dying in the women's ward of an old age home-these are among the voices that welcome audiences into a city whose streets, monuments, and stories form a fascinating microcosm of our troubled country, and the brutality woven through the fabric of its existence.

Beglarian describes, "The history of racial pain in this country is completely visible in Vicksburg: there is a Confederate Avenue; there is a Union Avenue. People live on Confederate Avenue and on Union Avenue; when you take your dog for a walk in the park, you walk out one of those avenues and back on another. The falsification of history that is so endemic in the whole culture feels less falsified there in a curious way - because it's all right there, and you can't avoid it. The first time I went to Vicksburg, on a trip paddling down the Mississippi River, this all seemed embedded in the streets, in the monuments, in battleground parks: a confrontation with that history felt like a part of everyday life. I felt like there was a song cycle here, and through working with Karen and Mallory, that song cycle has exploded over time."

Beglarian, whose relationship with Mabou Mines began when she composed music for Lee Breuer's Animal Magnetism, asked Karen Kandel to work on the project after watching her performance as a Union General in César Alvarez and the Lisps's Futurity, and noting her shape-shifting abilities as a performer. Kandel recalls, "She was responding to me as a performer in that I could embody something or someone that I don't look like: 'oh my goodness, you can play a man, a woman, a white woman, a Black man.' So playing with that was her first exciting ask for this piece, and then she said, 'would you write some of it?' And I said that would be really exciting."

Together, they traveled to Vicksburg-the first time Kandel had been to the true south. As they decided to weave their own perceptions of Vicksburg into the work, Kandel also enlisted the direction and insight of Mallory Catlett, whose family is from the South-and who pushed Beglarian and Kandel to find ways, in the work, to be even more transparent about their personal relationships to the material.

Says Catlett, "Though theater is a narrative form, I don't much consider myself a storyteller; I'm much more interested in our relationship to stories and the necessity psychologically we have for story. I think that I'm always tending towards thinking-with whoever I'm working with-what are our personal connections to the material and can we start from there and move outward?"

50th Anniversary Marathon

June 23-26, 2022

In Multiple Spaces at the 122 CC Building

150 First Avenue, New York, NY 10009

After a delay due to the pandemic, Mabou Mines now proudly celebrates its 50th Anniversary in person with audiences-convening a dynamic, intergenerational group of performers to participate in readings of 60 works produced by Mabou Mines. Among the many works the company will revisit are Samuel Beckett's The Lost Ones, Come and Go, Play, Company, Wortsward Ho and Happy Days, as well as Lee Breuer's Animations Series ranging from the company's first pieces, The Red Horse Animation and Shaggy Dog Animation to La Divinia Caricatura. Adaptations of classic texts such as Peter & Wendy, Mother, and a screening of Mabou Mines DollHouse reflect only a portion of the program. With both performers from original casts as well as actors and directors entirely new to the material-and providing fresh interpretations-this marathon celebration subverts the auteurist nature of retrospectives by highlighting and expanding on the organization's unwaveringly collective spirit. This legacy, of collaboration and play, continues to guide the organization towards the future. The four-day event will take place from June 23 - 26, 2022 in multiple spaces at Mabou Mines' home base at the 122 Community Center (122CC). A gallery exhibit of the company's 50 year archive will open on June 9th at the PS122 Gallery in the 122CC and will be curated by Nicholas Martin of NYU Fales Library.

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