GHOST QUARTET to Launch Inaugural 'Next Door at NYTW' Series; Lineup Announced!
By: BWW News Desk Aug. 30, 2017
New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) has announced the inaugural season of Next Door at NYTW in the Fourth Street Theatre, NYTW's newly renovated 65-seat black box space.
Next Door at NYTW provides a home for companies and artists who are producing their own work. Meeting the artists where they are in their process, this initiative provides each project with subsidized resources and space for development and performance in the newly renovated Fourth Street Theatre. As part of an ongoing effort to expand support for artists at every stage of their careers, this series will serve nearly 100 additional artists in the first year alone.
Next Door at NYTW expands the existing Artist Workshop roster, including the Dorothy Strelsin Mondays @ 3 reading series, Larson Lab studio projects, and summer developmental residencies at Adelphi University and Dartmouth College, by inviting audiences to see more fully-realized work by a wide variety of voices.
To convert the Fourth Street Theatre into a flexible work and performance space, NYTW knocked down the walls, removed the permanent seating, leveled the floor, installed a new lighting grid, upgraded the sound system and expanded the lobby. In the coming years, thanks to a generous grant from The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and Manhattan Borough President, Gale Brewer, NYTW will install a new state-of-the-art lighting system. The launch of Next Door at NYTW re-dedicates the space as a resource for artists to practice, develop and share their craft. During the inaugural season of Next Door at NYTW, audiences can play a part in making art happen by naming one of the brand-new seats with a 100% tax-deductible donation.
For its inaugural season, Next Door at NYTW will host ten productions, beginning in October 2017.
2017/18 NEXT DOOR Series:
GHOST QUARTET
Music, Lyrics and Text by Dave Malloy
Directed by Annie Tippe
Ghost Quartet is a haunted song cycle about love, death and whisky. A camera breaks and four friends drink, in four interwoven narratives spanning seven centuries: a warped fairy tale about two sisters, a treehouse astronomer and a lazy evil bear; a retelling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"; a purgatorial intermezzo about Scheherazade; and a contemporary fable about a subway murder. Murder ballads, doo-wop, jazz noise, and raucous campfire drinking songs collide in this surreal chamber musical from Dave Malloy, creator of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Featuring The Great Comet stars Brittain Ashford and Gelsey Bell, cellist Brent Arnold, designer Christopher Bowser and director Annie Tippe. Ghost Quartet will run from Thursday, October 5 - Tuesday, October 31, 2017.
THE ELEPHANT IN EVERY ROOM I ENTER
Created by Gardiner Comfort & Kel Haney
Featuring Gardiner Comfort
Directed by Kel Haney
The Elephant in Every Room I Enter is a strikingly intimate solo piece about Gardiner Comfort's experience as an actor living with Tourette's Syndrome. The play explores the week he spent at the Tourette Association of America National Conference in DC in April 2014--he'd never been around so many other people with Tourette's; it was the first time he could feel "normal." With mind-bending projections and sound design, which blend with Comfort's athletic, physical performance, this is a show unlike any other. The Elephant in Every Room I Enter is written by Gardiner Comfort, and directed by Kel Haney, and will run from Thursday, November 9 - Sunday, November 26, 2017.
Houses on the Moon presents
DE NOVO
Directed by Jeffrey Solomon
Houses on the Moon is presenting its acclaimed production of De Novo, which tells the true story of a teenaged boy from Guatemala who faced deportation after fleeing to the U.S. to escape gang life. The gang MS13 was the only family Edgar Chocoy had ever known, but he dreamed of a better life. At fourteen, he fled Guatemala City and traveled over 3,000 miles, across the borders of three countries in search of his mother, who left him when he was a baby to find work in the United States. Detained by the Department of Homeland Security, he pleaded with a Colorado judge not to deport him to Guatemala, where the gang he left had sentenced him to death.
This documentary play is crafted entirely from immigration court transcripts, letters, and extensive interviews conducted by Houses on the Moon company members in Los Angeles, Colorado and Arizona at Southwest Key, the largest facility for detained immigrant minors in the United States. De Novo is augmented with projected images from Donna DeCesare, an award-winning photojournalist who is widely known for her groundbreaking coverage of the spread of Los Angeles gangs in Central America.
De Novo provides a rare glimpse into the life of an "unaccompanied alien minor," thousands of whom make the dangerous journey across the border and through the U.S. justice system each year. Though there are thousands of foreign-born minors in U.S. custody; barriers of language, age, class, culture, and law conspire to make this population invisible to many. Their stories of migration are poignant, heroic and painful. They deserve to be heard. De Novo is directed by Jeffrey Solomon and will run from Friday, December 1 - Friday, December 22, 2017.
A CHRONICLE OF THE MADNESS OF SMALL WORDS
By Mac Wellman
Adapted for the Stage and Directed by Elena Araoz
Music composed and performed by Anna McClellan, Daniel Ocanto, Sean Smith and Graham Ulicny
Production Design by Justin Townsend
Performed by Anastasia Olowin and Timothy Siragusa
Associate Producers Amy Palen and María Cristina Fusté
Astrological disturbances split asteroids apart, and new smaller worlds hurtle into each other's orbits. Loved ones are wrenched from one another, old animosities arise, and these asteroidal inhabitants soon forget they once lived as one world. Mass amnesia buries their shared history, and it seems impossible that these estranged neighbors ever coexisted peacefully. Will they now be able to reach across borders and share a world of difference? How can you deal with aliens when you feel alienated yourself?
A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds pairs two short stories by eminent three-time Obie-winning playwright Mac Wellman, adapted for the stage by director Elena Araoz. Each story tells a fantastic and emotional tale of the imagined inhabitants of real asteroids in the asteroid belt. Wellman's hystericAl Verbal acrobatics lay bare the madness of our own small world. Live music composed by Drama Desk-nominated touring artists, alongside Tony nominee Justin Townsend's installation-style production design, coalesce into a vibrant and deliriously theatrical event. A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds will run from Wednesday, January 17 - Sunday, February 11, 2018.
Monk Parrots presents
TERMINUS
By Gabriel Jason Dean
Directed by Lucie Tiberghien
Monk Parrots are proud to present the second production and NYC premiere of Terminus by Gabriel Jason Dean (Princeton Hodder Fellow, Paula Vogel Award, Broadway Blacklist), directed by Lucie Tiberghien (The Other Thing, Don't Go Gentle, Soldier X, Hoodoo Love). Terminus is the second chapter in Dean's The Attapulgus Elegies, a semi-autobiographical collection of plays about the slow fade of an American mill town.
Terminus received its premiere at The Vortex in Austin, TX in 2016 and ran to critical acclaim, receiving the Austin Critic's Table Award for Best Drama and an unprecedented eleven B. Iden Payne Awards including Outstanding Script and Best Drama. Described as "a masterful work of great power and beauty," (BroadwayWorld) and "part of an important, groundbreaking cycle of American work that we can only hope will receive the widespread national attention it deserves." (Austin-American Statesman).
Terminus centers around Eller, a poor, white matriarch, and her mixed-race grandson, Jaybo, who live together down by the railroad tracks in rural Georgia. When Eller's mind begins to fade, her violent past haunts her from the very walls of the old family home. And as she descends terrifyingly closer toward the truth about who she is, Jaybo's capacity to love his grandmother is put to the test.
In a lyrical style that blends psychological realism with expressionism, Terminus treats racism as a disease and asks how are white Americans haunted by and continually complicit in the sustained trauma against black Americans. Terminus will run from Sunday, February 18 - Sunday, March 11, 2018.
DINNER WITH GEORGETTE
By Rick Burkhardt
Directed by Ellie Heyman
Dinner With Georgette begins as a farce, and evolves into a fantasia, on the subject of the closet.
Balti and Jaker begin the play as two gay 20-year-olds enjoying the romantic and sexual possibilities on their contemporary college campus. But when Jaker asks Balti to pretend to be straight for the duration of Jaker's Grandmother's visit to the campus, a chasm opens in the friends' consciousness, and Balti finds himself traveling back in time, with the help of a Cherub from the wrong side of the tracks.
As Balti sorts through the national history that binds him to Grandma's homophobia, he meets a yarn-spinning rattlesnake, a Korean-American war child, and the founders of the first gay bar in Las Vegas, Nevada. When he attempts to return to the comforts of modern-day gay life, he finds that time works differently inside the closet than outside, and his old love with Jaker may be irretrievable. Worse, his new friend the Cherub may be on the brink of death, due to human pollution of the time-stream. Dinner With Georgette, by Rick Burkhardt, directed by Ellie Heyman, will run from Friday, March 16 - Saturday, April 7, 2018.
Colt Coeur presents
THE BIG AND THE SMALL
By Amelia Roper
Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt
Funerals are for the living. What happened and why and who did it and how, none of that matters in the moments before. This is a play about the moments before. The Big and the Small is a series of two-handers, each in identical hotel rooms in a grand hotel in Zürich, as guests enjoy the last moments of their private, awkward, funny and not-so-funny lives. Themes of nationalism, tourism, social responsibility, isolation, class and gender roles are all explored in The Big and the Small, as well as the tension between public vs. private and assimilation vs. diversity. Written by Amelia Roper and directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, The Big and the Small will run Saturday, April 14 - Sunday, May 6, 2018.
I AM A BOYS CHOIR presents
THIS IS WHAT YOU SHALL DO...
By I AM A BOYS CHOIR (Adam Rigg, Chris DeVita and Kate Attwell)
I AM A BOYS CHOIR proudly presents a real live history show performed by a community of intergenerational performers. A spectacle of pageant and pageantry that opens up a queer past hundreds of centuries old. A history that is concrete, veiled, and/or totally imagined. But, "What is the past?" You may ask yourself, "and how does now begin and end?" And most importantly "Will there be a quiz?" This Is What You Shall Do... explains the presence of the present, exploding outwards to a place where time loses linearity, the future is now, and the past is covered in stardust. This Is What You Shall Do... will run from Thursday, May 10 - Saturday, May 26, 2018.
Blessed Unrest presents
THIS IS MODERN ART
By Idris Goodwin & Kevin Coval
Directed by Jessica Burr
A team of artists who were never greeted inside the hallowed halls of the Art Institute of Chicago decide to introduce themselves. They paint a fifty-foot graffiti piece on the towering wall of the New Modern Wing, asking us to reconsider what art is and where it belongs while bringing dire consequences on themselves. They are marginalized young men of color willing to risk everything to make their voices heard and prove that another paradigm is possible. This acclaimed and controversial play, commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and written by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval, makes its New York premiere under the direction of Jessica Burr. This is Modern Art will run from Friday, June 1 - Sunday, June 24, 2018.
BORDERS
Winner of the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Fringe Award
By Henry Naylor
Directed by Michael Cabot
Inspired by encounters with refugees, Borders is an urgent, moving and occasionally hilarious commentary on one of the great crises of our time. Through two alternating monologues, Borders tells the stories of a British press photographer and a Syrian graffiti artist, whose paths cross in tragic circumstances. Written by the multi-award winning Englishman Henry Naylor, (whom The London Times described as 'one of our best new playwrights') the show was one of the biggest hits of the Edinburgh Festival selling out its entire run and accumulating an astonishing 19 five- and four-star reviews and the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Fringe Award. Boldly directly by Michael Cabot, it's fast-paced, stripped-back theatre which conveys a huge and epic story using just two superlative actors, simple lighting and a couple of stools. When Borders won the Scotsman's Fringe First, Naylor became one of just a handful of writers to have won the leading award three times. Borders will run from Saturday, June 30 - Sunday, July 22, 2018.
Tickets for Next Door at NYTW will be available for each production on a first-come, first-served basis, online at NYTW.org, by phone at 212-460-5475, or in-person at the NYTW Box Office. Standard ticketing fees apply. Ticket prices vary by production. New York Theatre Workshop members and donors receive discounted tickets for the Next Door at NYTW series.
Season memberships for the NYTW Season are now on sale at www.nytw.org or 212-460-5475. The 2017/18 season will kick-off on September 6, 2017 with The New York premiere of Mary Jane by NYTW Usual Suspect and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Amy Herzog (4000 Miles, Belleville), directed by NYTW Usual Suspect and two-time Obie Award winner Anne Kauffman (Sundown, Yellow Moon; A Life); followed by HUNDRED DAYS, with a book by The Bengsons (Iphigenia in Aulis) and Sarah Gancher (The Place We Built), featuring music and lyrics by The Bengsons, direction by Anne Kauffman, and movement direction by Obie Award winner Sonya Tayeh (you'll still call me by name). The season will also include the World Premiere of AN ORDINARY MUSLIM, by NYTW Usual Suspect Hammaad Chaudry (Salaam, Mr. Bush), directed by NYTW Usual Suspect and Obie Award winner Jo Bonney (The Body of An American); a new production directed by NYTW Usual Suspect, Tony Award nominee, and three-time Obie Award winner Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown; Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812) of LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, by NYTW Usual Suspect and five-time Obie Award winner Caryl Churchill (Love and Information; A Number); and The New York Premiere of THE HOUSE THAT WILL NOT STAND by Marcus Gardley (X: Or, Betty Shabazz v. The Nation), directed by NYTW Usual Suspect and Obie Award winner Lileana Blain-Cruz (Red Speedo; The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World).
New York Theatre Workshop, now in its fourth decade of incubating important new works of theatre, continues to honor its mission to explore perspectives on our collective history and respond to the events and institutions that shape all our lives. Each season, from its home in New York's East Village, NYTW presents four new productions, over 80 readings and numerous workshop productions for over 45,000 audience members. NYTW supports artists in all stages of their careers by maintaining a series of workshop programs, including work-in-progress readings, summer residencies and artist fellowships. Since its founding, NYTW has produced over 100 new, fully staged works, including Jonathan Larson's Rent; Tony Kushner's Slavs! and Homebody/Kabul; Doug Wright's Quills; Claudia Shear's Blown Sideways Through Life and Dirty Blonde; Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told and Valhalla; Martha Clarke's Vienna: Lusthaus; Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, Far Away, A Number and Love and Information; Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's Aftermath; Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová and Enda Walsh's Once; Rick Elice's Peter and the Starcatcher; David Bowie and Enda Walsh's Lazarus; Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown; and eight acclaimed productions directed by Ivo Van Hove. NYTW's productions have received a Pulitzer Prize, seventeen Tony Awards and assorted Obie, Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards.
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