The Straddler to Premiere LONG ISLAND RICHARD at Anthology Film Archives, 12/1

The Straddler will premiere "Long Island Richard," an examination of American suburbia that draws upon Shakespearean characters and text, at Anthology Film Archives on December 1, 2016. Employing dialogue from Richard III and weaving additional text and characters from a variety of the Bard's works throughout, "Long Island Richard" paints a relentlessly ordinary and starkly horrifying portrait of a familiar American locale.

"Modern-day Shakespeare adaptations often aim to help audiences better understand Shakespeare's world and his rich and brilliant texts," said Dan Monaco, Director of Long Island Richard and Co-Editor of The Straddler. "We are taking the opposite approach. In keeping with The Straddler's mission of employing Western culture, past and present, to better understand and illuminate contemporary society, 'Long Island Richard' looks to Shakespeare's texts to examine a locale that has in many ways served as the blueprint for the American suburb has we have come to know it-Long Island."

Built upon economic aspiration, manufactured pastoral settings, and white flight, Long Island looms large in the development of postwar America as one of the country's first large-scale suburbs. A prototype for the nation more broadly, the location is ideal for investigating economic and social frustrations and inequality. "Long Island Richard" follows a modern-day Richard III and his desperate struggle for power, friendship, and love amidst a cauldron of greed, violence, and betrayal.

"We are committed to long-form articles, interviews, photographic essays, fiction, visual art, and poetry in our bi-annual magazine and namesake The Straddler," said Elizabeth Murphy, producer of Long Island Richard and co-editor of The Straddler. "The magazine has been interdisciplinary since our launch in 2007, and so it has been a natural evolution for our company to bring the magazine to life in other art forms-from our staging of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land to our Cerebral Variety Circus to 'Long Island Richard,' our first film."

Long Island Richard
Adapted from texts by William Shakespeare
Directed by Dan Monaco
With Ed Renninger, Mitchell Friedman, Todd Pate, Marianna McClellan, Christopher Hurt, Bruce Barton, Jordan Kenneth Kamp, Marty Brown, Carol Thomas, and Erica Cardwell.

Cinematography by Jeremy Lee
Costume Design by Ben Philipp
Original Music by Greg Bennetts and Elaine O'Malley

December 1, 2016 at 8pm

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue at 2nd Street
New York, NY 10003

Tickets are $20 and may be purchased at Brown Paper Tickets or by calling 1-800-838-3006.

About The Straddler
The Straddler is an interdisciplinary arts organization dedicated to bringing together literary, visual, and performing artists with leading intellectuals from disparate fields of study. The company's literary magazine and namesake, The Straddler, is published bi-annually and features a mix of interviews with artists, authors, policy-makers, economists, activists, and academics; essays on contemporary cultural issues; fiction; visual art; and poetry.

Contributors to the magazine include Academy Award-winning filmmaker Peter Davis ("Hearts and Minds"), in a conversation about translating documentary storytelling to his first narrative fiction work; acclaimed theater and opera director Peter Sellars (Nixon in China, St. Matthew Passion) discussing his practice and the challenges of contemporary American creativity; economist James Kenneth Galbraith (The Predator State, Inequality and Instability) examining the stability of the American middle class and the services and institutions that help maintain it; journalist Kim Ghattas (The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power) on U.S. foreign policy and her time covering Hillary Clinton's State Department for the BBC; architectural historian Kazys Varnelis (Network Architecture Lab) on the history and changing relationship between American cities and suburbs; artist Trevor Paglen on secrecy and the surveillance state; and editor and public intellectual Lewis Lapham on the role of a changing media and new technologies on discourse and democracy.

Alongside its magazine, The Straddler produces live theater and performance, and will premiere its first film, "Long Island Richard," in December 2016. thestraddler.com.

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