Immersive Multimedia Work IDIOT Begins Tonight at HERE

As part of its 2015-2016 Producing Season, HERE presents the Artistic Director production, IDIOT, conceived by writer Robert Lyons (Text) and HERE Artistic Director Kristin Marting (Director, Choreographer), adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot. This immersive multimedia theatre work features Purva Bedi, Lauren Cipoletti, Daniel Kublick and Merlin Whitehawk. A limited engagement plays 21 performances, tonight, April 28, through May 21 at HERE (145 Sixth Avenue, just below Spring Street).

A charismatic prince, a notorious woman, a spoiled socialite and a jealous rival square off in an electric quartet-and you're invited to the party. In this hybrid response to Dostoevsky's The IDIOT, immersive staging, sophisticated live cinematography, gestural vocabulary, and original music launch you into the mind of a conflicted man in a tug-of-war between desire and empathy. In the face of a corrupt society, be there as he battles the depths and heights of human experience. As guests of the Prince, the audience experiences the party though his guileless consciousness over one epic evening, as he navigates the boundaries between love and obsession, pity and compassion, societal greed and spiritual epiphanies.

IDIOT is conceived by Robert Lyons (Text) and Kristin Marting (Direction & Choreography). This world premiere production features Purva Bedi, Lauren Cipoletti, Daniel Kublick and Merlin Whitehawk, and includes Scenery by Nick Benacerraf, Video by Ray Sun, Original Music by Larry Heinemann, Costumes by Kate Fry and Lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew.

IDIOT marks the third original theatrical work by Robert Lyons and Kristin Marting, created in response to Dostoevsky texts. In 1991, they reimagined The Possessed for a run at the Ohio Theatre, and then returned to Dostoevsky a few years later, crafting three short stories (White Nights, The Double and The Landlady) into a theatrical fever dream called The Fever, which premiered at HERE in 2001. In 2008, they returned to The Possessed, further compressing and refracting it into a distilled original theater work that was critically acclaimed in its engagement at HERE. IDIOT was first developed at the Orchard Project in 2014 and the entire creative team presented highly designed workshop versions of IDIOT in 2015 in HERE's CultureMart festival, NACL's Deep Space in Highland Lake and New Ohio's Ice Factory festival.

Robert Lyons (Creator / Writer) is a playwright, director, and the Artistic Director of the New Ohio Theatre in Manhattan's West Village. As a playwright, Robert has more than twenty New York premieres to his credit, most recently as one of the playwrights of Trade Practices, produced on Governors Island, and as co-writer of Lush Valley, both produced by HERE and directed by Kristin Marting. Other New York productions include, Nostradamus Predicts the Death of Soho, Red-Haired Thomas ("a sweetly fractured fairy tale" - The New York Times) and Doorman's Double Duty ("A gem" - The New York Times). Other full length and short plays include, PR Man, No Meat No Irony, The Naked Anarchist, Dream Conspiracy, Creature of the Deep, no thanks/thanks, Vater Knows Best and Floorboards, which have been presented by the Ohio Theatre, HERE, Clubbed Thumb, The Foundry Theatre and Synapse Productions, among others. His work has been developed in residencies at the Orchard Project, The Playwright's Center of Minneapolis, MASS MoCA, the Bogliasco Foundation, The Farm and MacDowell Colony. His favorite directing projects include Vaclav Havel's Protest (with Havel in attendance) and multiple plays and performances of Lenora Champagne. Robert has an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College (program dir. Mac Wellman), and currently serves as Creative Director of the Sarah Lawrence College Theatre Season.

Kristin Marting (Creator / Director / Choreographer) is a director of hybrid work. Over the last 25 years, she has constructed 27 stage works, including 12 original hybrid works, 8 reimaginings of novels and short stories and 7 classic plays. She works in a collaborative, process-driven way to fuse different disciplines into a cohesive whole. She has developed a unique directorial form that features a "gestural vocabulary" used both as an emotional signifier and as a choreographic element. Kristin has directed 17 works at HERE and also premiered works at 3LD, Ohio Theatre and Soho Rep. Her work has toured to 7 Stages, Berkshire Festival, Brown, MCA, New World, Painted Bride, Perishable, UMass, Moscow Art Theatre and Oslo. She has directed readings and workshops for Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, Playwrights Horizons, Public Theatre, Target Margin and others. Selected residencies include Cal Arts, LMCC, Mabou Mines, MASS MOCA, NACL, Orchard Project, Playwrights Center, Smack Mellon, Voice & Vision and Williams. She has also directed productions for Cal Arts, NYU and Sarah Lawrence. Kristin was named a nytheatre.com Person of the Year for Outstanding Contribution, a Woman to Watch by ArtTable and honored with a BAX10 Award. Kristin is a political activist who has organized many art actions. She teaches Creative Producing at New School and has lectured at a number of universities. She served as Co-President of the League of Professional Theatre Women. She assisted Robert Wilson on Salome and Hamletmachine and co-founded the tiny mythic theatre company. She graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts with honors in 1988. Kristin is co-founder and Artistic Director of HERE, where she directs projects, cultivates artists and programs two performance spaces for an annual audience of 30,000. Most recently for HERE, she directed the opera cabaret Bombay Rickey in PROTOTYPE Festival 2015 and the highly interactive and uniquely collaborative Trade Practices (2014, Governors Island). She is currently developing Silent Voices with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, which will premiere in 2017.

The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Artistic Director and Kim Whitener, Producing Director), named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theatre by Time Out New York, is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performance viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines-theater, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art. Standout productions include Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique and Arias with a Twist, Hazelle Goodman's On Edge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle's all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Corey Dargel's Removable Parts, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Kamala Sankaram's Miranda and Robin Frohardt's The Pigeoning, among many others. In 2008, following an extensive renovation, HERE re-opened the doors to its long-time downtown home for the arts, where it continues as a vibrant, welcoming haven for artists and audiences alike.

The HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) has been HERE's signature development and producing program since 1998. HARP commissions, develops and premieres new hybrid performances. Productions developed at HERE challenge existing boundaries between disciplines -- theater, dance, music, opera, puppetry, media, visual arts, installation, spoken word and more. Through HARP, the Resident Artists are given the unique opportunity to develop their projects for up to three years through free works-in-progress showings, workshop presentations in HERE's annual CULTUREMART festival, culminating in full-scale productions.

Each season, HERE premieres several of these Resident Artist productions as mainstage works. These innovative projects are grown in a diverse artistic community where artists receive career development resources and hands-on training. HARP has been widely recognized as a unique model for artistic development for the field to emulate. In honoring HERE with the 2009 Ross Wetzsteon Award, the OBIE Committee noted, "it's become increasingly hard for artists to find a place to take risks, a safe haven where they can develop daring new work. One theater has regularly bucked the trend, making its mission to ensure that artists have a home for their research and development, and that theatregoers can sample the exciting results."

HERE is also home to the cross-disciplinary productions of Artistic Director Kristin Marting and proudly hosts adventurous artists, companies and productions, whether emerging or acclaimed, through its SubletSeries. It also presents work from New York, across the country, and around the globe through the Dream Music Puppetry Program (co-curated with Basil Twist), and the widely acclaimed PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now festival of opera-theater and music-theater, co-produced with Beth Morrison Projects.

IDIOT plays April 28 - May 21: Tuesday - Sunday at 8:30pm. Tickets $25.00. Tickets can be purchased at www.here.org or by calling (212) 352-3101 or at the HERE Box Office (5PM until curtain on show days).

HERE's 2015-2016 Season began with the Resident Artist production Genet Porno by Yvan Greenberg (September 9 - 26) and followed with the Resident Artist production Chang(e), devised in collaboration by Soomi Kim & Suzi Takahashi (November 4 - 22). In April, HERE's season continues with the opera-theater work Science Fair, a Resident Artist production by Hai-Ting Chinn (April 13 - 24) and this Artistic Director production, IDIOT. HERE's 2015-2016 Season also included the fourth annual PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now festival, and HERE's yearly CULTUREMART festival, giving audiences a first look at new work in process from artists in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP).

IDIOT is a HERE Artistic Director Production, where it has been developed for production over the past three years. The project also received development and production support from New Ohio Theatre, where a workshop was presented as part of the 2015 Ice Factory Festival. IDIOT was developed, in part, with assistance from the Orchard Project, a program of The Exchange, and NACL (North American Cultural Laboratory). Subsidized rehearsal studio space has been provided by the A.R.T./New York Creative Space Grant, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Finally, IDIOT has received generous support from the Axe-Houghton Foundation, mediaThe Foundation, and a community of individuals.

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