Prospect Theater Co Offers Free Symposium in Conjunction With THE HIDDEN SKY

In conjunction with the New York premiere production of The Hidden Sky, Prospect Theater Company will host an afternoon symposium featuring scholars and artists, including the show's creators. The discussion will focus on the relationship between mathematics and music, the historical conflict between science and religion, and other ideas explored in this new musical. Admission to this special event is free. 

The panel discussions will take place on Saturday, February 20th from 3pm - 5:30pm at the West End Theatre (263 West 86th St, 2nd floor, in the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew). Panelists include Professor Anthony Phillips, of the Mathematics Department at Stony Brook University, and Professor David A. Stone, of the Mathematics Department at Brooklyn College, as well as Nancy Rhodes, artistic director of the Encompass New Opera Theatre. Also participating will be bookwriter / director Kate Chisholm and composer / lyricist Peter Foley, the creators of The Hidden Sky. The panel discussions will be moderated by Prospect's Producing Artistic Director Cara Reichel. Reservations are encouraged by emailing rsvp@ProspectTheater.org.

The Hidden Sky, based on the Ursula K. Le Guin short story "The Masters," is the second production of Prospect Theater Company's 2009-2010 season. Science and religion collide in this sophisticated and mythic new musical. An apocalypse, brought on by the misuse of technology, has ravaged the earth. A society has arisen where science, mathematics, and the pursuit of knowledge have been forbidden by the ruling priests and forgotten by the people. Based on a short story by acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, this award-winning musical tells the story of Ganil, a young woman whose longing for knowledge leads her on a passionate journey of discovery. As she risks her life in pursuit of truth, devastating events force her to make a profound leap into the unknown. With a soaring, eclectic score featuring lush choral singing, The Hidden Sky is a mythical tale of aspiration, awakening, and the indomitable human spirit.

The Hidden Sky continues performances at the West End Theatre (in the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, 263 West 86th Street) through February 28, 2010. Performance schedule varies, please see calendar below. Ticket prices are $25 for adults and $22 for students (with valid ID) and can be purchased in advance by calling (212) 352-3101 or by visiting www.ProspectTheater.org. (Service charges will apply.) Depending on availability, tickets may also be purchased at the box office, which opens one hour prior to performances.

The Hidden Sky premiered at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia, where it receivEd Barrymore Award nominations for Outstanding Original Score and Outstanding New Play. Music from the show has previously been performed in concert at Ars Nova and Joe's Pub. The Hidden Sky received a New American Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Richard Rodgers Development Award. For his score, composer-lyricist Peter Foley received the Stephen Sondheim Award from the American Music Theater Festival and a grant from the Jonathan Larson Foundation.

Remaining public performances of THE HIDDEN SKY are scheduled for the following dates and times are as follows: Thursday, February 18 @ 8PM, Friday, February 19 @ 8PM, Saturday, February 20 @ 8PM, Sunday, February 21 @ 3PM, Wednesday, February 24 @ 8PM, Thursday, February 25 @ 8PM, Friday, February 26 @ 8PM, Saturday, February 27 @ 8PM, and Sunday, February 28 @ 3PM.

About the Panelists

Kate Chisholm (book, director, THE HIDDEN SKY) has directed original works at The Culture Project, La MaMa, Joe's Pub, Baltimore Theatre Project, Columbia University, Towson University, and the Yale Center for British Art. As a writer, Kate won a Richard Rodgers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received a Barrymore nomination for Outstanding New Play, both for The Hidden Sky. Kate holds a BA from Yale and an MFA in Theatre from Towson University. She is a New Georges Affiliated Artist, a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Director's Lab, and an alum of the St. Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab, where she created and designed Newton's Universe. She has received grants from Theater Instituut Nederlands, the US/ Netherlands Touring & Exchange Project, and St. Ann's Warehouse (Brooklyn, NY).

Peter Foley (music and lyrics, THE HIDDEN SKY) received an NEA Grant, a Richard Rodgers Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award (from the American Music Theater Festival), and a grant from the Jonathan Larson Foundation for his music and lyrics for The Hidden Sky. His other stage works include The Bear, music for "To Sing" from Songs from an Unmade Bed (New York Theatre Workshop) and scores for several plays, including Newton's Universe (St. Ann's Warehouse), Henry V (New Jersey Shakespeare Festival), and Alice in Wonderland (Berkeley Theater Project). Peter was recently commissioned by the Signature Theater (Arlington, VA) to create a new musical for their "American Musical Voices: The Next Generation" project. Other pieces in development include a collaboration with playwright Ellen McLaughlin and director Michael Greif, and an original musical comedy, Bloom. Peter's art songs and cabaret material have been performed at Lincoln Center's American Songbook, Town Hall, Symphony Space, and Joe's Pub, among other venues. He is also the composer of the Emmy-nominated PBS series, Art:21. Peter has received fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell and Millay colonies, the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Music Theater Conference, and the Sundance Playwrights Retreat at Ucross. He is an alum of the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop and the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, and is currently a resident artist in the American Lyric Theater Composer/Librettist Development Program.

Anthony Phillips was born in New York, was an undergraduate at MIT, and a graduate student at the University of Paris and Princeton. He has spent most of his career on the Mathematics faculty at Stony Brook. His research has been in topology, and the applications of topology to problems in mathematical physics. His teaching and publications have also borne
on the interface between mathematics and art, mathematics and music. He co-taught "Math/Art" with Pamela Davis, an artist and "Approaching Mathematics through Art and Music" with Andrew Buchman, a musician. He contributed "The topology of Roman mosaic mazes" to Leonardo (1992); his feature columns on the American Mathematical Society website (www.ams.org) include "Math and the Musical Offering" (03/99), "The mathematics of piano tuning" (09/00), "Alberti's perspective construction" (01/02), and "Inside-out frieze symmetries in ancient Peruvian weavings" (10/08).

Nancy Rhodes is the librettist-director for a new opera, The Theory of Everything, exploring ideas of science, spirituality, and indigenous cosmology, with composer John David Earnest. Concert readings of Theory were sponsored by the Science & Arts Series, CUNY, and performed at Symphony Space and New York City Opera's VOX. Previously she staged the world premiere of Kirke Mechem's Tartuffe for San Francisco Opera, and Virgil Thomson's Lord Byron at Alice Tully Hall. Internationally, she directed Death In Venice in Stockholm, Carmen in Oslo, Happy End in Finland, and Eccentrics, Outcasts and Visionaries for the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. As Artistic Director of Encompass New Opera Theatre, she's fostered over 150 new works by emerging composers/librettists, and staged numerous contemporary operas--Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, the 75th anniversary of Four Saints in Three Acts, Blitzstein's Regina, Britten's Phaedra, Elizabeth and Essex, starring Estelle Parsons, and Ricky Ian Gordon's Only Heaven.

David A. Stone spent his schoolboy years in England, but has since lived almost entirely in the U.S. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate and Princeton for graduate school. He is a professor in the Mathematics Department at Brooklyn College, where he has taught for 35 years; and he is a member of the Doctoral Faculty in Mathematics at the Graduate Center of CUNY. His research publications in mathematics fall in the overlap between topology, differential geometry and combinatorics. He has also written a paper, Omni meets Feynman: The Interaction Between Popular and Scientific Cultures, on scientific writing for the general public. He takes a semi-professional interest in art, psychoanalysis and their overlap. Dr. Stone lives in Highland Park, NJ and in Accord, NY. He is married and has a daughter.

Prospect Theater Company is a non-profit organization founded in 1998 by five graduates of Princeton University, working together with a diverse group of emerging theater professionals in pursuit of artistic excellence and innovation. Known both for its development of new musicals and its engaging interpretations of classic plays, Prospect strives to build bridges between artists and audiences, and to connect theater's present to its past-in order to build its future. For more information on Prospect Theater Company, please visit www.ProspectTheater.org.

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