Target Margin Theater's Reimagining of THE ICEMAN COMETH Begins at HERE Today
By: BWW News Desk Jun. 02, 2016
Target Margin Theater presents The ICEMAN Lab, a radical new reimaging of The Iceman Cometh, with four diverse theater artists each tackling a separate act of the play. This fresh take on O'Neill's classic will give audiences the opportunity to see each act as a separate experiment or all together in a single sitting. The four acts of The ICEMAN Lab play a varied schedule at the HERE Arts Center (145 6th Avenue) beginning today, June 2 through June 25, with special marathon performances on June 11 and June 18.
The Lab program will also include a special workshop showing of Strange Interlude by David Greenspan (in partnership with Transport Group) on June 21; a staged reading of Beyond the Horizon by Ann Marie Dorr on June 14; and an afternoon pub crawl on June 25 with O'Neill biographer Robert M. Dowling.
"We are thrilled to be continuing our two-season exploration into Eugene O'Neill's work. Our Lab Series allows us to take four unique vantage points on The Iceman Cometh, affording audiences the chance to fully explore O'Neill's epic play as separate experiments or all together for two special marathon performances," said Founder/Artistic Director David Herskovits.
The TMT Lab offers smaller, fully-produced productions and has enlisted the talents of over 1,000 theater artists since 1993. At the helm of each production is a Lead Artist-- a director, actor, writer, designer, or puppeteer. TMT curates each season's Lab under an overarching theme then works with each Lead Artist to find the right source material. From then on they are provided a stipend, budget, artistic resources and, most importantly, the freedom to shape their work.
LAB OVERVIEW:
ICEMAN ACT I
Shane Chapman and Julia Sirna-Frest present a song cycle that meanders through disCHORDant changes and sings to the sweet oblivion that is life as a listless drunken human. The White Stripes, Eugene O'Neill and Funkadelic walk into a bar and drink and sing themselves into an obliterated, raucous, life-affirming musical explosive stupor. A song cycle with a shot of the real. Featuring Sarah Bennett, Shane Chapman, Lisa Clair, Chris Giarmo and Julia Sirna-Frest.
Thursday, 6/2 at 7pm
Saturday, 6/4 at 7pm
Friday, 6/17 at 7pm
ICEMAN ACT II
By Yuris Skujins
Bleak beautiful horrible visions haunt this downbeat birthday celebration. Fraught wicked partygoers mull and defend and deny their weak standing under their even weaker circumstances. Lights shining at ends of dark tunnels are hazily glimpsed, then lost to these delirious booze-soaked rallying souls. Offstage brawling and frightful dialects hint at promising theatricality. Featuring collaborations with Douglas Langworthy and Meredith Palin.
Friday, 6/3 at 7pm
Saturday, 6/4 at 4pm
Thursday, 6/16 at 7pm
ICEMAN ACT III
By Katie Rose McLaughlin
Exits and entrances. Characters turned inside out. Internal psychodrama repurposed into constant physical movement. Six female dancers play O'Neill's fourteen barflies in a highly choreographed study of existential dread, rising to the occasion and falling back down again. Featuring Belinda Adams, Ronnell Kitt, Emily Pacilio, Victoria Roberts-Wierzbowski, Mary Kate Sickel, and Taquirah Thompson.
Thursday, 6/9 at 7pm
Wednesday, 6/22 at 7pm
Friday, 6/24 at 7pm
ICEMAN ACT IV
An audio and live-action puppetry animation journey into the sobering minds of the wax figures who were once proud and ambivalent drunks at Harry Hope's bar. Tomorrow is now. The poetry of the language will be the lens through which the tragedy and redemption unfolds and becomes universal. Featuring Tomas Del Valle, Amy Jensen, Connie Hall, Valarie Pham, and Merlin Whitehawk.
Friday, 6/10 at 7pm
Thursday, 6/23 at 7pm
Saturday, 6/25 at 7pm
ICEMAN Marathon Performances (Acts I - IV)
On June 11th and June 18th join Hickey down at Harry Hope's saloon (aka HERE) for special marathon performances of The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill. For two nights only you'll have a chance to see Acts I - IV by Julia Sirna-Frest, Yuris Skujins, Katie Rose McLaughlin and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew presented together, in order, making for one of the most radical productions of The Iceman Cometh the world has ever seen.
Saturday, 6/11 at 1pm
Saturday, 6/18 at 1pm
SPECIAL EVENTS:
BEYOND THE HORIZON reading
A reading of O'Neill's 1920 Pulitzer-prize play, directed by TMT Associated Artist Ann Marie Dorr.
Tuesday, 6/14 at 6pm
STRANGE INTERLUDE
In partnership with Transport Group, TMT is proud to present a special workshop of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude conceived and performed by David Greenspan.
Tuesday, 6/21 at 7pm
O'NEILL Pub Crawl
Join us for an afternoon Pub Crawl through Greenwich Village on Saturday 6/25 with O'Neill biographer and author of Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts. Robert M. Dowling. Meet at White Horse Tavern (567 Hudson).
Saturday, 6/25 at 3pm
Visit www.targetmargin.org or www.here.org for tickets and more information.
This production is part of the SubletSeries@HERE: Co-op, HERE's curated rental program, which provides artists with subsidized space and equipment, as well as technical support.
BIOGRAPHIES:
Julia Sirna-Frest (Lead Artist, ICEMAN Act I) is a performer, singer and teaching artist. She is a founding member of the Obie award winning theater company Half Straddle and most recently performed in their production of Ancient Lives at The Kitchen. Other collaborations include: Mac Wellman, Target Margin Theater, William Burke, Jeanette Yew, Zoë Geltman and Rady&Bloom. She plays ukulele and sings in Doll Parts, Brooklyn's premiere Dolly Parton cover band, and has developed work and performed at The Incubator, St. Ann's Warehouse, The Brooklyn Museum, La MaMa ETC, Abrons Art Center, The New Museum, Mass MoCA, JACK, PS 122, Joe's Pub, The Bushwick Starr, Soho Rep, and New Dramatists.
Yuris Skujins (Lead Artist, ICEMAN Act II) is an Associated Artist of Target Margin Theater. Previously he directed TMT Lab Events Sonoma and Boca (both of which he authored, as well) along with Bronks Ekspress, The Moth and the Flame, Hexachloraphene, Rook, A Family Affair, and The Scarecrow. He has acted in numerous TMT Mainstage productions including Uncle Vanya, These Very Serious Jokes, Tulpa, Mamba's Daughters, Cymbeline, and Titus Andronicus amongst many others. He is a graduate of Cornish College of the Arts.
Katie Rose McLaughlin (Lead Artist, ICEMAN Act III) is a choreographer & movement director. She trained at the Joffrey Ballet School and at clown school in Switzerland, and has performed in Walker Arts Center-commissioned dance pieces and as Esmeralda in Redmoon Theater's Hunchback off-Broadway. Her choreography has been presented by the Chocolate Factory, Catch, Invisible Dog, Dixon Place, AUNTS, Movement Research, and the International Festival of Art & Ideas, and she has worked with directors Joshua William Gelb, Katherine Brook, Sarah Rose Leonard, Eliza Bent, Mia Rovegno, Frank Boudreaux & Sarah Krohn among others. She was an artist-in-residence at LMCC's SPARC program (2013) and the Barn Arts Collective (2015) and is the Artistic Director of Designated Movement Company.
Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (Lead Artist, ICEMAN Act IV) is a puppetry artist and a theater designer in lighting and video. Using these mediums, Jeanette creates innovative and interactive performances. Her recent production, Are They Edible? was called "bold" and "inventive". Additionally, The Butcher Men, a toy theater production, was invited to 2006 Prague Quadrennial and MILK, based on the Book of Genesis, was part of St. Ann's Warehouse's Labapalooza 2007. Jeanette has received support from the Jim Henson Foundation, the Urban Artist Initiative, Artist Trust, Queens Council on the Arts, Puppeteers of America, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the NEA/TCG Career Development Program.
Ann Marie Dorr (Lead Artist, Beyond the Horizon). Recent projects include tiger, tiger (on the nature of violence) by Jess Almasy (Dixon Place), Heartbreak by Ariel Stess (The Bushwick Starr), Grimly Handsome by Julia Jarcho (JACK). Past productions with TMT include Drunken With What (Abrons Arts Center), Reread Another (The Brick and The Bushwick Starr), Composition...Master-pieces...Identity (The Connelly Theater), The Gertrude Stein Labs (The Bushwick Starr & The Connelly Theater) and Uriel Acosta: I Want That Man! (The Chocolate Factory). Associated Artist of Target Margin Theater.
David Greenspan (Lead Artist, Strange Interlude) is an Associated Artist with Target Margin Theater. With the company he has performed his monologue plays Composition...Master-pieces...Identity and The Argument (Obie), acted in Faust, Dinner Party and The (*) Inn, and wrote Old Comedy. He has received two performance Obies: one for The Boys in the Band and one for Faust (Target Margin) and Some Men. He has performed solo renditions of The Patsy and Gertrude Stein's lecture Plays; as well as his own plays, most notably Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy (Obie), The Myopia, Go Back to Where You Are and I'm Looking for Helen Twelvetrees. Guggenheim, Lortel and Fox Fellowships, an Alpert Award and an Obie for Sustained Achievement.
Robert M. Dowling (author of Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts) is professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. His biography Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts (Yale University Press) was named a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for biography in 2014. Dowling's other books include Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem(University Press of Illinois, 2007); the two-volume Critical Companion to Eugene O'Neill(Facts on File, 2009); the anthology Eugene O'Neill and His Contemporaries Bohemians, Radicals, Progressives, and the Avant Garde (co-edited with Eileen Herrmann, MacFarland, 2011); and a compendium of reviews, Eugene O'Neill: The Contemporary Reviews (co-edited with Jackson R. Bryer, Cambridge University Press, 2014). Dowling has written articles for The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Drunken Boat, and The Eugene O'Neill Review, among many other publications. He serves on the editorial board of The Eugene O'Neill Review and the board of directors for the Eugene O'Neill Society.
Target Margin Theater was founded in 1991 by Artistic Director David Herskovits. For 24 years Target Margin has been praised for its aggressive interpretations of classic texts, lesser-known works, and new plays inspired by existing sources. TMT has presented ambitious re-thinkings of plays by Shakespeare, Chekov, Brecht, Gertrude Stein, and Beaumarchais, among others. TMT has also created original works and new music / opera over the years and has served over 1,000 artists (mostly emerging) through its annual LAB. In addition, TMT is committed to nurturing the creative aspirations of the next generation of theater makers in the TMT Institute, our yearlong fellowship program. The company's artistic and cultural vision has resulted in 40 Mainstage productions including 11 world premieres, 8 company-created works, 3 U.S. premieres and 5 new translations, which have garnered 4 OBIE Awards and employed over 500 Equity actors and hundreds of other theater artists. The company's production of Mamba's Daughters received an OBIE Award, and their epic 2004-06 production of Goethe's Faust received extensive critical acclaim. Recent productions include Uncle Vanya and The Tempest at HERE, Uriel Acosta: I Want That Man! at The Chocolate Factory, Composition...Master-Pieces...Identity, a new solo performance piece from OBIE Award-winner David Greenspan at The Connelly Theater, and, most recently, Drunken With What at Abrons Arts Center and Reread Another at The Brick, called "something kind of wonderful" by Ben Brantley in The New York Times.
Illustration by Jesse Hawley
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