A CHRONICLE OF THE MADNESS OF SMALL WORLDS Announces Extension At New York Theatre Workshop's Next Door

A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds, a pairing of two hilariously profound monologues from legendary playwright Mac Wellman's story collection, adapted and directed by Elena Araoz, has extended its run Next Door at New York Theatre Workshop through Sunday, February 11. The production is produced and sponsored by Harvey and Kathleen Guion and Dan McCarthy.

The production is being presented as part of the inaugural season of Next Door at New York Theatre Workshop, a new works program that provides a creative home for artists and theatre companies who produce their own work. Performances began January 17.

A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds is adapted from two short stories in Mac Wellman's published collection of the same name. Each story is told by one of the imagined inhabitants of a "small world" in the asteroid belt. Written in the 1990s in response to the fall of the Soviet Union, they meditate on boundaries, separation, and the yearning tension between sameness and difference.

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?

"As soon as I wrote these asteroid short stories, I knew they needed to be theatre pieces," says playwright Mac Wellman. "I'm thrilled that Elena Araoz and Justin Townsend see the timeliness of these mad small world pieces about borders and difference and that they are staging them in New York City after the great runs we had in Boston and Omaha."

A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds features Anastasia Olowin and Timothy Siragusa with live music composed and performed by Drama Desk-nominated Daniel Ocanto, Sean Smith and Graham Ulicny, who are joined by acclaimed singer-songwriter Anna McClellan. Alongside the installation-style production design by Tony nominee Justin Townsend and costume design by Sarita Fellows, Wellman's hysterical verbal acrobatics coalesce into a vibrant and deliriously theatrical event.

Tickets for Next Door at NYTW can be purchased online at NYTW.org, by phone at 212-460-5475, or in-person at the NYTW Box Office, located at 79 East 4th Street. Standard ticketing fees apply. Ticket prices are $34 & $38. New York Theatre Workshop members and donors receive discounted tickets for the Next Door at NYTW series and can order tickets at www.nytw.org/next-door-nytw.

Mac Wellman (Playwright): Mac Wellman is best known in the theatre for his experimental work, which rebels against common theatrical conventions. He is the author of more than forty plays, and his work has been produced by some of the most renowned Off-Broadway, regional and international theatres. His recent productions include Bitter Bierce (Performance Space 122), Antigone (Big Dance Company), 3 2's; or AFAR (Dixon Place), 1965 UU (The Chocolate Factory), and The Offending Gesture (The Tank and 3-Legged Dog). He collaborated with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang on the opera The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, adapted from a short story by Ambrose Bierce. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1990, he received his first Obie award for Best New American Play. In 1991, he received another Obie award for Sincerity Forever. In 2003, he received a Lila Wallace-Readers' Digest Writers Award, a third Obie award for Lifetime Achievement, and a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is a co-founder of The Flea Theater in New York City, the Donald I. Fine Professor of Playwriting at Brooklyn College, and in 2010 he became a CUNY Distinguished Professor.

Elena Araoz (Director): Elena Araoz is a director of theatre and opera. Her most recent New York City productions include Maria Irene Fornes' Mud (Boundless Theatre Company), Octavio Solís' Prospect(Boundless Theatre Company), Dipika Guha's Mechanics of Love (To-by-For Productions), Catherine Filloux's Kidnap Road (La MaMa), Virginia Grise's She-She-She (Ice Factory Festival, New Ohio), Hilary Bettis' Alligator (New Georges and The Sol Project), Warren Leight's Union Square Incident (The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway, American Airlines Theatre), and "Bystanders," (Anna Deavere Smith and the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue). Her play Two Arms and a Noise, which was recognized by the Latino Theatre Commons as one of t "thirty-six plays and writers that everyone should know," was recently presented at the Bucharest International Theatre Platform in Romania. The Drama League named Araoz their inaugural Beatrice Terry Artist-In-Residence, where she completed her play Plastic Drastic. Upcoming, she will direct Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare Festival St. Louis). She is a faculty member at Princeton University.

Justin Townsend (Production Designer): Justin Townsend is an international lighting and set designer for performance. He received two 2016 Tony Award nominations for The Humans and American Psycho and was awarded two 2016 Drama Desk Awards (also for The Humans and American Psycho). His Broadway lighting designs include: American Psycho, The Humans, The Little Foxes, Present Laughter, Fool for Love, Casa Valentina, A Night with Janis Joplin, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, The Other Place, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Upcoming: Saint Joan at MTC. As Creative Director, Justin collaborates with Grammy-winning recording artist Drake, most recently creating a 50'-tall replica of the top of the CN Tower for Drake's OvO Fest in Toronto. The two also paired up this year on the rapper's "Boy Meets World" European tour. Justin maintains a strong relationship with the experimental Off-Broadway theater scene, and most recently, has worked on Kidnap Road with Elena Araoz at LaMama, Ten out of Twelve at Soho Rep, and Longing Lasts Longer with Penny Arcade at St. Anne's Warehouse. Justin received an Obie award for Sustained Excellence in Lighting Design in 2014. Additional awards include: Henry Hewes, Outer Critics Circle Award, Lucille Lortel Awards and NAACP Theatre Award. He is an Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College, dedicated to affordable theatrical education and training.

Anastasia Olowin (Performer): Off-Broadway: The Killer (Theatre for a New Audience). Other NY credits: includes: Mechanics of Love, Stitches, and Marie Marie Marlene (To-By-For Productions), You On the Moors Now, Set in the Living Room of a Small Town American Play, and Three Seagulls, or MASHAMASHAMASHA! (Theater Reconstruction Ensemble), Plum de Force (The Bushwick Starr), Obedient Steel (Tugboat Collective), Obskene (The Talking Band), Target Margin's Lab Series. She is co-producer at To-By-For Productions, a film and theater Production Company dedicated to making work by women, for everyone.

TIMOTHY SIRAGUSA (Performer): Timothy Siragusa is based in Omaha, Nebraska. Recent work: Ghosts Wonder What Went Wrong (Great Plains Theatre Conference), Mike Daisey's The Trump Card and The Santaland Diaries (The Blue Barn, Omaha), Plastic Drastic and The Borrowers (Omaha Theatre Company for Young People), Wu World Woo (Sleeping Weasel at ArtsEmerson, Boston).

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