Theaterlab Announces The 2024-25 Season

Theaterlab will present its 2024-25 season, entitled Poetic Machine. Featuring new and upcoming works by returning resident artists, the lineup includes performer Joseph Medeiros, Stefanie Nelson Dancegroup, multimedia artist Mafe Izaguirre, director and performer Lita Lofton, and playwrights Joey Merlo, Forrest Malloy, and Shelley Mitchell, with more works to be announced. 

The titular Poetic Machine refers to the creative process – but also to the venue itself. Artistic Director Orietta Crispino explains: “This season, we continue to foster longstanding relationships with the artists who presented their work in our spaces in the past. As a curator and producer, I'm fascinated by creating opportunities for more ‘electric' work by inviting artists coming from completely different fields to work together and see what happens. Experimentation for its own sake is not what Theaterlab strives for; I see our white boxes as vessels for creators who think about technology and storytelling in unexpected ways, bringing a renewed desire for live performance. I hope that we can give our audience these pockets of such poetic weirdness.”

The season opens with The Gallery Series presentation – Book 4 of Joseph Medeiros' fascinating ongoing solo project, The Odyssey in Ancient Greek (Sept 13 and 15).  Medeiros is memorizing Homer's Odyssey in the original Ancient Greek and creating solo performances of individual books with the ultimate aim of presenting the 24-book epic in its entirety as a large-scale, 24-hour solo performance. The text is performed without simultaneous English translation, encouraging the audience to trust their intuition and fall into the language beyond its literal meaning. All elements of the performance (lights, props, costumes, etc.) are managed and manipulated by the performer himself, taking the idea of the solo act to the extreme. Following the presentations of Books 1-3 (shown, respectively, at the artist's home, in Central Park, and in other people's living rooms), Joseph presents Book 4, featuring the appearance of Helen of Troy, the capture of the shape-shifting sea god Proteus, and the mournful prayer of Penelope. In January 2025, he will also present the first 4 books at Theaterlab as one 5-hour performance, taking his first step in the durational aspect of the project.

Also in September, Stefanie Nelson Dancegroup returns to the Mothers, Myths, Monsters – a residency series that invites artists to craft work on the comforting and sometimes terrifying figure of the Mother, with bodies at once fecund and ferocious; the complex Myths that shape our personal and collective identities; and/or the repulsive yet riveting Monster  – with Creating DEA (Sept 16-24). It is the first look at the movement-centered retelling of Nostra Dea, a 1925 play by the pioneering Italian playwright Massimo Bontempell, whose work, as of yet unproduced in the US, will be a subject of examination for other multidisciplinary artists later this season. Nostra DEA – a dark, absurdist comedy, by the author considered the first to use the term “magical realism” in the context of literature – features multiple characters, including the female protagonist who absorbs the qualities of every outfit she's given. In SND's take on this work, Bontempelli's idea is reinterpreted to reflect the reality of our time: an era when women's rights are in peril, and humanity seems no wiser than it was a century ago. 

Venezuelan-born multimedia artist Maria Fernanda (Mafe) Izaguirre, known for her intricate cyber-sculptures, returns to Theaterlab with The Postpoetic Machine, a unique series of cybernetic explorations into the residual dimensions of human-machine communication. Set within a hybrid landscape, this interactive experience invites the audience to challenge conventional language boundaries and embrace interspecies communication. The Postpoetic Machine propels us toward new existential and transcendental horizons, confronting us with more inclusive and interconnected speculative scenarios, stimulating thought and reflection. The presentation, consisting of an exhibition and performances with guest artists Enrique Enriquez, Peter Sciscioli, and Yoko Murakami will be on view from October 30 through November 13.

In December, Theaterlab's frequent collaborator playwright Joey Merlo will present a staged reading of his new work Out of Memory (Dec 2-8). Asked about this project, Merlo explains: “After my Nonna's death from her decade-long battle with Alzheimer's, my mother and I went on a road trip to find out more about the mysterious woman neither of us knew much about. ‘My mother never told me anything' – my mom would often repeat. Fusing interview transcripts with auto-fictitious scenes, this piece of hybrid docu-theater uses communal memory and family lore as a way to explore dissolving identity and the process of love transmuting from one generation to the next—even from beyond the grave.” Theaterlab's Orietta Crispino will perform in this production. 

After over a year of development, director/performer Lita Lofton and The Social Club Thtr return in February 2025 with their full-length production of On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco and Other Substances, first unveiled for the First Look Series in the Atelier atTheaterlab in February 2024. A fragment, a dream, and a patchwork quilt, On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco and Other Substances is a compilation of over 100 of Anton Chekhov's lesser-known short stories along with his personal letters and journal entries. Set at a dinner party on a frozen winter's night, the play tells an entirely new and yet somehow familiar story of love, loss, struggle, and everyday life in our own beautiful and complicated country. 

The Russian playwright was an inspiration by another work of this season – Nina (Jan-Feb 2025), written by Juilliard graduate Forrest Malloy, adapted and directed by Katie Birenboim who also produces, along with the performer Francesca Carpanini (who debuted at Theaterlab in 2023 production of This Beautiful Future). The show invites the audience into the women's dressing room of a prestigious New York City Drama school where five young actresses don't just study their lines: they laugh, cry, fight, flirt, compete, hope, plan, and dream, until a shocking revelation forces them to question the nature of their artistic and personal bonds. With echoes of Chekhov's The Seagull, Nina is a poignant, yet hilarious portrait of both the psyche of the young artist and female friendship. 

Shelley Mitchell is the adapter and performer of Talking with Angels: Budapest, 1943 (March 6-30, 2025). The play – first staged in 2001 and performed to critical acclaim around the world – follows Gitta Mallasz, who defied the horrors of the Holocaust by masquerading as a Nazi officer and, in collaboration with a local Catholic priest, sheltered scores of persecuted Jews in an abandoned cloister in Budapest. Mallasz was recognized by Yad Vashem in 2012 as Righteous Among the Nations for the successful rescue of over one hundred Jewish women and children. Thematically, the play has been described as  “Schindler's List meets My Dinner with André, with a twist of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Theaterlab's Molly Shayna Cohen is directing. 

Tickets for the 2024 calendar year productions go on sale on August 15. For more information, visit theaterlabnyc.com.

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