Aquila Theatre Company Receives Largest Grant Ever NEH for 'Page and Stage' Program

Aquila Theatre Company (Peter Meineck, Artistic Director) is proud to announce that it has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities of $292,585 to launch its newest program, PAGE and STAGE: Theater, Tradition, and Culture in America. No other NY theater company received a grant of this size from the NEH. In fact, this is the largest outright grant to any NY State organization. "We are thrilled that the NEH is backing this groundbreaking program to combine the performing arts centers and libraries to reach new audiences, " said Mr. Meineck.

PAGE and STAGE: Theater, Tradition, and Culture in America will be an in-depth national partnership between the library and the theater.  This project will place live theatrical events, reading groups and lectures in public libraries to inspire people to come together and read, see, and think about classical literature and how it continues to influence and invigorate American cultural life. The Aquila Theater Company, the Urban Libraries Council (ULC), the American Philological Association (APA) and the Center for Ancient Studies at New York University will develop and guide this program that will forge a unique partnership between 16 public libraries with their local performing arts centers. The program will take place from March 2009 through May 2010 and will be hosted by Brooklyn, Memphis, Newark, Topeka, Lawrence, Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, Fort Lauderdale, Nashville, West Palm Beach, Palm Beach, Newcastle, NY, Queens, NY, San Diego, White Plains, NY and Newport News, VA. The program is guided by Peter Meineck, Artistic Director of the Aquila Theater Company and Clinical Assistant Professor of Classics at New York University, Martîn Gómez, President of the Urban Libraries Council, and Jay Kaplan, Director of Programs and Exhibitions at the Brooklyn Public Library, Dr. Matthew Santirocco, Dean of The College of Arts and Science and Director of the Center for Ancient Studies at NYU, and Dr. Judith Hallett, Professor and Chair of Classics at University of Maryland and Vice President for Outreach of the American Philological Association.

The program is organized around four thematic units:
-Know Thyself: Issues of Identity.
-Nothing in Excess: Crossing Boundaries.
-The Trojan War: History or Myth?
-From Homer to Hip-Hop: Reinventing the Classics.

These units will explore significant humanities themes that investigate the connections between classical literature and contemporary America to examine the central place of the classics in our lives. There will be an additional focus on cross-cultural impact relating to the African-American, Asian-American and Latino experience. The program will consist of free public performances of Homer's Iliad by the Aquila Theater Company at each library, and an acting master-class using Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors to demonstrate how these themes have been conveyed, and are still relevant today.  There will also be scholar led reading groups, lectures and post-performance discussions.  Libraries will be partnered with local performing arts centers to maximize publicity and audience sharing. In addition, libraries will be provided with access to specially designed web resource and provided with books and marketing materials.

Page and Stage aims to achieve the following goals:
-To inspire people to read, consider, discuss, and experience classical literature and the significant humanities themes these works convey.
-To deepen people's understanding of the classics and their influence in their own cultural experience.
-To develop new audiences for libraries and heighten the public's awareness of their collections, resources, and public programs. 
-To increase the library circulation of classical and dramatic literature.
-To create a new model for cultural programming between the library and the performing arts that can be emulated across America.
-To enable libraries to develop performance-based programming that will appeal to their particular diverse audiences and build on the library as a cultural center in the community.

The Aquila Theatre Company has been touring productions of classical literature and related educational programs for seventeen years and presenting a regular season in New York for the past eight. The company's 60-city annual tour is the largest classical theater tour in America and the dates for the 2008-'09 performances of The Iliad and The Comedy of Errors have already been booked. Aquila will deploy its extensive production and traveling resources in support of this program. By partnering with libraries, Aquila will gain access to new and underserved audiences for both its educational and theatrical work and increase it presence in the communities it visits. This program will allow the company to spend time developing teaching techniques with scholars and most importantly greatly advances Aquila's mission to bring the greatest works to the greatest number.

The public libraries included have been selected by Aquila in consultation with Martîn Gómez, the President of the Urban Libraries Council and Danielle Millam, the Senior Vice President for Program & Development (Libraries and arts centers are listed under 'Resources').  The aim was to introduce this program to a cross-section of public libraries, of differing sizes, geographic location, and diverse audiences. 

Aquila will kick off their NY theater season with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in November. Catch 22 is a modern American classic. The term itself has entered the language as a description of a ridiculously cyclical situation. The book by Joseph Heller was first published in 1961 and immediately caused a huge furor in the literary world. In 1971, Heller himself created a play based on his best-selling novel.                      

Since then, Catch-22 the play has not received a professional production. Aquila feels this is a work by one of America's great creative geniuses, and it deserves to be seen. Yossarian is a bombardier on a B-25, based on a small island off the coast of Italy in 1944. He starts to question the futile and ridiculous administration of his air base and seeks a way to preserve his life when the whole world around him seems to be going mad. Like a modern-day Achilles, Yossarian protests with powerful and often hilarious results. Catch-22 tackles huge things with rich metaphors, boldly drawn characters and near-impossible situations. It is a work of great theatricality with superb language and a sense of dark surrealism. Heller dares to examine the very philosophy of war and what it does to the humans that fight them. For a whole new generation of Americans, Yossarian Lives!

Spring will see Aquila's production of Homer's Iliad. Aquila explored the first part of Homer's Iliad in a groundbreaking production at Lincoln Center in 1999, returning to the project several times over the past nine years with performances at Classic Stage Company, NYU and Columbia University. There can be no doubt that Homer's epic story of Achilles and the Trojan War is one of the greatest works in world literature.

Aquila's production is inspired by the cover of Stanley Lombardo's translation, which is a photograph of the D-day landings, entitled, "Into the Jaws of Death." A disparate group of soldiers and refugees take refuge from a savage war and find solace and humanity in Homer's epic tale. Nine years after the start of the Trojan War, the Greeks are still unable to defeat their enemy. Agamemnon, the commander clashes with the best warrior, Achilles over the division of war-prizes and is forced to give back the girl Chryseis to her father after Apollo sends a terrible plague. Agamemnon claims Achilles' war-prize Briseis to save face and the furious Achilles withdraws from the fighting and asks the Gods to turn the war against the Greeks. This marks the first time all three parts of Homer's Iliad will be presented in NYC.

"How can we find meaning in war? We are presenting two plays that deal with the human response to warfare. Homer's Iliad is a 2700 year-old text originally created for performance that tells the story of the rage of Achilles, the cost of war, and his personal search for honor and meaning. In many ways Catch-22 is an American Iliad, and Yossarian, a modern-day Achilles, a decorated war hero, makes a stand against the way the war is waged. I feel both Homer's epic poem and Heller's own play, based on his ground-breaking novel, need to be seen on stage," said Peter Meineck.

Peter Meineck has directed and/or produced over 40 productions in NY, London, Holland, Germany, Greece, Scotland, Canada, Bermuda, and the US in venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall, the ancient Stadium at Delphi, Lincoln Center, and the White House. Peter has published several volumes of translations of Greek plays including Aeschylus' Oresteia, which won the Lewis Galantiere Award for Literary Translation from the American Translators Association, Sophocles' Theban Plays (with Paul Woodruff) and Philoctetes and Ajax and Aristophanes' Clouds, Wasps & Birds. He has also written several literary adaptations for the stage including The Man Who Would Be King, Canterbury Tales, The Invisible Man, in addition to Catch-22. He also acts as a mythological advisor, most recently to Will Smith on I Am Legend.

The Aquila Theatre Company was founded in London in 1991 by Peter Meineck and has been based in New York City since 1999. Aquila's mission is to bring the greatest theatrical works to the greatest number. Aquila presents a regular season of plays in New York, at international festivals, and tours to approximately seventy American towns and cities a year. Aquila also provides access to excellent theatre for people in under-served rural and inner city communities. Aquila is the company in residence at New York University's Center for Ancient Studies. The Aquila performance approach is a technique developed by Peter Meineck that combines text and physical action based in a theory of theatrical unity. The technique is aimed to create an aesthetic environment where the performer can create and recreate a role in a consistently changing theatrical atmosphere. Aquila Theatre broadens the classical cannon, collaborates across the performing arts, deepens a commitment to artistic excellence, teaches and exchanges idea and embraces new technology.

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