The Assembly Expands The Deceleration Lab

The Assembly has announced this year's recipients of the Deceleration Lab, an initiative to foster new theatrical projects that experiment with multi-perspective and multi-disciplinary models of creation. The 2023-2024 Deceleration Lab will support the development of three new works led by artists Devin McCallion Fletcher, Minna Lee, Lillian White, Erin Amlicke and Marlena Ospina.

White, Amlicke and Ospina are collaborating on Thursday: a fantasia, an experimental response to G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday that upends everything you think you know about the days of the week, the people who count them, and what to do with the ones we have. Fletcher explores the relationship between the brain and our sense of self in The Memory Game: A Ghost Story. And Our Town meets Build-a-Bear in Lee's interactive installation Memory Bear.

In-process showings of these artists' work will be open to the public and announced at a future date.

The Assembly, a collaborative theater collective whose ten original plays include New York Times Critic's Pick HOME/SICK, Seagullmachine, and the upcoming musical In Corpo, launched the Deceleration Lab in 2020 to support artists in The Assembly's broader community to develop work that takes artistic risks, challenges traditional hierarchical structures, and creates new professional opportunities for the participating artists. Previous Deceleration Lab artists include Andy Boyd, Nehassaiu deGannes, Dante Green, syd island, Soomi Kim, Matthew Paul Olmos, Philip Santos Schaffer, and Melisa Tien.

Memory Bear is an interactive installation of talking stuffed animals that invites visitors to witness a series of stories shared by Minna Lee, their Hmong family members, and you. Over 100 customized plush toys with voice recorders will gently guide each visitor through this unreliable magic we call memory. Memory Bear insists that you slow down and notice as much as you can.

The Memory Game: A Ghost Story is a multi-sensory, ensemble-based exploration of perception, loss, and identity that asks: who are we when who we are is suddenly changed? Drawing on experiential and environmental devising methods, Devin McCallion Fletcher and a group of artists confront the fallibility of memory, medical bureaucracy, and how to make sense of the mysteries of the human mind.

Thursday: a fantasia is an experimental response to G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, a metaphysical thriller detailing turn-of-the-century anxieties around anarchism that still ring true today. This is a world where nothing is what it seems, identity is unstable, masks are removed to reveal more masks, and anarchist and police personae dissolve into each other. Drawing on the novella as well as historical research around political and artistic movements of the early 20th century, we are creating a visually striking, improvisational performance in which the audience participates with us in a sort of tender, irreverent rehearsal for more revolutionary living. Building on a previous developmental workshop at Burning Coal Theatre, creators Lillian White, Erin Amlicke and Marlena Ospina are thrilled to bring the next stages of this project to life through the Deceleration Lab.

Erin Amlicke (she/her) - Writer/Actor, Thursday: a fantasia - is a queer playwright and actor, hailing from Nashville, TN and based in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. Her plays have been produced by Burning Coal Theatre (Selene and the Dream Eater - staged production) and Dixon Place (& Light & Light & Light - staged reading). Erin's work as a multidisciplinary artist began with Playtime, a subterranean, immersive play that she directed at Oberlin College. She continues working as a writer, actor, and deviser, making sometimes magical and often surreal plays in order to disrupt expectation, encourage childlike wonder and reveal the absurdities of late stage capitalism. She has also performed at Theatre at Monmouth, Hangar Theatre, Cherry Artspace, The Navigator's Theatre Company, The Brick Theatre, Smart Mouth Theatre Company, and Juneberry Collective. She is a graduate of the University of Houston's MFA in Acting program. www.erinamlicke.com

Devin McCallion Fletcher - Lead Artist, The Memory Game: A Ghost Story - is a theater artist and administrator based in New York City and the coast of Maine. Some credits include: The Bushwick Starr, Ars Nova, Lincoln Center Education, The Assembly, Joe's Pub at The Public, Two River Theater, American Repertory Theater, Trusty Sidekick, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wildrence, Camden International Film Festival. She served as the Director of Programs at Maine Media Workshops + College from 2020-2022. Education: Emerson College. When not in a theater, she can usually be found reading a mystery or shucking oysters.

Minna Lee - Lead Artist, Memory Bear - is a Hmong-Vietnamese American writer and animator living on Lenapehoking who enjoys sharing stories about South East Asian mythology and queer love. Their play, My Home on the Moon, will have its World Premiere at San Francisco Playhouse in January 2024. Minna is a 2022 Sesame Workshop Fellow and MFA Playwriting candidate at Hunter College (24').

Marlena Ospina (she/her) - Writer/Actor, Thursday: a fantasia - is an NYC-based "comedic horror folk" musician and a clown who performs disruptively/joyously. Her instruments are her body, voice, piano, and guitar. She performs and works as a stage manager as well, working for the National Queer Theatre's Criminal Queerness Festival, Section 175 at HERE Arts Center, and the Exponential Festival. In 2021 she devised and publicly performed a street clown show unshrouding the classist and racist landscape architecture history in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado, and advocating to end the camping ban that targeted unhoused community members. With Ray Elizabeth Wilson, Marlena comprises the antifolk comedy duo Prettypretty. Together, they wrote and performed the musical Type Me Queer on the Dixon Place mainstage and are working on a new song cycle. See Marlena on guitar and vocals in the new hot girl rock band, Spare Feelings! She leads the trans audio drama from Musical Theatre Factory, The Doctor Is Dead, out now wherever you listen to podcasts! She is also turning into Bigfoot against her will. @billionairerecipes

Lillian White (she/her) - Director/Deviser, Thursday: a fantasia - Originally from South Carolina, Lillian makes theater in New York, the Carolinas and Peru. Her artistic perspective is shaped by rural roots and global travels, which inspire a passion for dynamic, elemental performance that stokes the imagination and asks big questions. Her work has been seen in and outside of traditional theater spaces at the BorderLight Festival, HERE Art Center, Dixon Place, Governor's Island, Grafton Reintegration Center, Burning Coal Theatre, SETC, Asheville Fringe Festival, the Darlington GOPO, as well as La Alianza Francesa and El Galpón (Peru). In 2019, Julie Taymor sent her to Latin America to study theater, which opened the door to ongoing international research and collaboration. www.lillianwootenwhite.com

THE ASSEMBLY is a collective of multi-disciplinary performance artists committed to realizing a visceral and intelligent theater for a new generation. Assembly members unite varied perspectives in service of wide-reaching, unabashedly theatrical and rigorously researched ensemble performances, crafted to spark conversation with their audiences. Their work embraces the complexities of our present moment; it is a call for empathy and engagement. Embracing collaboration as the core of the creative process, the company chooses projects through consensus and develops text, action and design side-by-side within the rehearsal environment. From workshops to productions to post-performance discussions, The Assembly is dedicated to rooting its artists, audiences, and peers in a profound sense of community.

The New York Times called The Assembly "a cutting-edge young theater collective...intense and thoughtful." The Wall Street Journal described them as "passionate, formally inventive theater makers who make much of delving into historical texts." Huffington Post called the group "makers of amazingly provocative theater."

The company has performed at venues across New York such as La MaMa ETC, Jack, New Ohio Theatre (Archive Residency Award), The Incubator, The Prelude Festival, HERE Arts Center, Horse Trade, and The Collapsable Hole, and has toured to the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles, Wesleyan University, the Edinburgh Fringe (Fringe First nomination) and the Philly Fringe. In 2016, The Assembly's process was documented by Professor Cindy Rosenthal in the cover essay of the industry's leading academic journal, The Drama Review: "Circling Up with The Assembly: A Theatre Collective Comes of Age." The Assembly's educational workshops are designed to foster empowered and empowering collaborators, training young artists in the ethics and techniques of their unique method of ground-up creation. The company has worked with students at top-tier colleges and universities like Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, Williams, and Wesleyan, as well as workshops in NYC, LA, and online. The Assembly is currently developing the company's first musical In Corpo, by Ben Beckley and Nate Weida and music by Nate Weida, which will premiere in June 2023 at Theatre Row. For more information visit assemblytheater.org or follow The Assembly on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok at @assemblytheater.

The Assembly is Stephen Aubrey, Ben Beckley, Emily Caffery, Jess Chayes and Meredith Lucio.

The Deceleration Lab is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council. Learn more about the Deceleration Lab at assemblytheater.org/lab.

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