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Theatre for a New Audience Presents NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, Opens 11/7

By: Sep. 23, 2010
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Theatre for a New Audience, in association with Baryshnikov Arts Center, presents the New York premiere of Yale Repertory Theatre's production of Notes from Underground, the revolutionary novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground is adapted for the stage by the OBIE Award-winning actor Bill Camp, and RoBert Woodruff. It is directed by Mr. Woodruff and stars Mr. Camp as the Underground Man.

Notes from Underground, based on a translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, begins previews Sunday, November 7, at 7:00pm; opens November 11 at 7:00pm for a run through Saturday, November 20 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center's Jerome Robbins Theater,450 West 37th Street.

When it premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2009, The Boston Globe described the production as"brutal, funny, agonizing and profound...It is at once a faithful adaptation of Dostoevsky's strangely modern novel and a brilliantly original and theatrical work of art."

"I am a sick man...I am a wicked man," cries the Underground Man, one of modern literature's first and most remarkable antiheroes. A former government official who has defiantly withdrawn from a corrupt society, the Underground Man wages his own personal war on everything-and everyone-around him.

This haunting, compelling play is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's landmark 1864 novella, Notes from Underground. The Underground Man, having resigned his position as a civil servant to live in isolation, holes up in a squalid office cluttered with discarded equipment and wet snow. Obsessively reliving old wounds and spurning any chance at affection, he begins a descent into madness that is at times heartbreakingly funny, at times disquieting, but always honest, searing and unforgettable.

Also on stage with Mr. Camp are sound designer/composer Michaël Attias as Apollon and Merritt Janson as Liza, both of whom will also perform the music.

The creative team for Notes from Underground includes scenic designer David Zinn, costume designer Moria Sine Clinton, lighting designer Mark Barton, sound designer and composer Michaël Attias, projection designer Peter Nigrini and associate projection designer Daniel Vatsky.

Bill Camp previously appeared on stage for Theatre for a New Audience in Howard Brenton's Sore Throats in 2006, Measure for Measure in 1996 and Macbeth in 1999. Mr. Camp won an OBIE for Homebody/Kabul and appeared on Broadway in Coram Boy, Heartbreak House, Jackie, Saint Joan and The Seagull, and at the New York Shakespeare Festival in Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus and Twelfth Night.

Mr. Woodruff's most recent production for Theatre for a New Audience was Rinde Eckert's Orpheus X last season; his previous productions for the Theatre have included Edward Bond's Chair in 2008, Edward Bond's Saved in 2001 and The Changling in 1997. He is the former artistic director of the American Repertory Theater. In the 1970s, Mr. Woodruff was virtually the sole director of Sam Shepard's work, starting with The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife in 1976 which was followed by the American premiere of Curse of the Starving Class at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1978, the world premieres of Buried Child (1978) and True West (1980) at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco and then in New York, and the touring productions of Tongues and Savage/Love, which MR. Shepard co-authored with the performer Joseph Chaikin. In the last three decades, he has directed plays at Lincoln Center Theater, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Brooklyn Academy Of Music, the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. In 2002, Mr. Woodruff succeeded Robert Brustein as the second Artistic Director in the history of the American Repertory Theater, a post he held until 2007. He serves on the faculty of Yale University where he directed the world premiere of Notes from Underground at Yale Repertory Theatre in March of 2009.

Tickets for Notes from Underground are $75 ($60 if purchased before October 3) and may be purchased via SmartTix at www.smarttix.com or (212) 868 4444.



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