Krista Knight's CRUSH Wins Broadway On Demand Film Festival

CRUSH, a VR puppet play by Krista Knight, is one of the winners of the inaugural Broadway on Demand Film Festival, a short film festival created to honor the groundbreaking ways creators approach theatre in a digital age and socially-distant world. The award-winning short film will be streamed on the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Emmy OTT platform this fall.

Picking up roughly from where Kafka left off-a loner, squatter, and rebel dares to love. We follow the anti-morphosis through a series of beat poetry performances as our hero draws nearer to the object of his desire and his undoing.

When Krista Knight's play CRUSH, a finalist for the 45th Annual Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, was canceled due to COVID-19, Knight and Brinegar decided to use the virtual tools they'd been experimenting with prior to the pandemic to create something completely remotely, completely in-house. Literally, in their house. CRUSH was created in Knight and Brinegar's 500 sq-ft home studio in the East Village. They recorded actor Ben Beckley in two sessions over Zoom (on his iPhone) and set up a home nerve center with 5 monitors (assembled from a motley crew of tablets, computers, and spare screens) and used virtual technologies to capture motion in 3D space to match the vocal performance. With one person in virtual reality and the other watching the footage, they recorded the live animation.

The voice of the cockroach is provided by Ben Beckley* (What the Constitution Means to Me on Broadway; HOME/SICK with The Assembly) with Vocal Direction by Matt Dickson (Where Did We Sit on the Bus? with Actors Theatre of Louisville). Created and directed by Krista Knight and Barry Brinegar. Produced by No Puppet Co. *Appears courtesy of the Actors' Equity Association

Krista Knight (Playwright/Co-Creator) is a Juilliard School Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program Fellow (2016-2018), Page 73 Playwriting Fellow (2007), MacDowell Fellow (2008), Shank Playwriting Fellow at the Vineyard Theatre (2011-2012), Chance Theater Resident Playwright (2020), Vanderbilt Writer-in-Residence (2021), and winner of the Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville (2016). Her work includes LIPSTICK LOBOTOMY (Kilroys List; Trap Door Theatre), DON'T STOP ME (musical with Dave Malloy), KIRK AT THE SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT HYATT (NYTW's Summer Residency; Vineyard Theatre reading series; Playwrights Foundation Rough Reading; Martha's Vineyard Playhouse/ MacDowell Benefit), PRIMAL PLAY (New Georges; Playwrights Center of MN), HISSIFIT (Cradle Theatre; Berkeley Rep School of Theatre; Rhodes College), SALAMANDER LEVIATHAN (Joe's Pub at The Public Theater; Ars Nova Ant Fest; Fingerlakes Musical Theatre Festival; Inkwell; KCACTF Musical Theatre Award from the Kennedy Center for best book), DOOMSURFING (Parkside Lounge; UCSD), SELKIE (Williamstown Workshop; Dutch Kills), and 17 plays and musicals for young audiences. Commissions include the script for a ride at Tokyo Disney, The Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, The Assembly, Live Girls!, The Steinmetz Lab, and an EST/Sloan Commission. Krista has been in residence at La Napoule Art Foundation, Tofte Lake, The Orchard Project, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Page 73's Summer Residency at Yale, Santa Fe Art Institute, UCROSS, Yaddo, and MacDowell.

BA: Brown University. MA: Performance Studies from NYU. MFA Playwriting: UC San Diego. Alum of EST's Youngblood, TerraNova Groundbreakers, Page 73's Interstate 73, New Georges JAM, Fresh Ground Pepper Playgroup, and The Civilians R&D Lab. www.KristaKnight.com

Barry Brinegar (Co-Creator) is a composer, performer, and multimedia artist originally from Siloam Springs, Arkansas. His minimalist approach to production yields short, simple, infectious pop hooks that are both familiar as references/allusions and original in execution and context. Brinegar fronts the band David's Pegasus in NYC while continuing development of various multimedia and theatrical IPs with Krista Knight including: the bit-pop grand guignol SALAMANDER LEVIATHAN, the apocalyptic surf-rock musical DOOMSURIFNG, the country western roadshow SLOPPY BONNIE, THE NANOMAN: a multimedia outreach program that interfaces STEM disciplines with the performing arts via an original video game, stage show, and animated shorts, the Icarus adaptation LIGHT EMBRACE, coliseum-rock JULIUS' SUPER SUNDAY BLOODSPORTING GAMES, FORDLANDIA, the Orwellian Hee-Haw allegory of capitalism CORN COBBERS, and the short holiday plays BLOOD ELVES: POLAR JUSTICE and THE SNOWMAN FROSTY. www.davidspegasus.com

No Puppet Co. is the retro-forward theatre team of Krista Knight and Barry Brinegar. As a synthesis of Juilliard playwright and pop composer from Northwest Arkansas, we hope through our work to explore how the conventional notions of theatre might be restructured and reconsidered to draw audiences into a unique and immersive experience. For us, the term 'retro-forward' means both an intense appreciation for the classics and standards that have shaped the theatre world and pop culture in general, but also the compulsion to push the nostalgia into new environments; to live it in our present day to day lives, and to dream it into the future. We make use of available technologies to enhance our artistic vision and be bold in our definitions of what constitutes a "platform" or a "stage" from which we can edify and entertain an audience.

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