The Brewing Dept's THE LADY FROM THE SEA Runs Now thru 11/17

The Brewing Dept. is proud to present the final production of its inaugural cycle, a new staging of Henrik Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, running tonight, November 14-17, 2013.

The Lady from the Sea is Ibsen's magical (and at times darkly magical) comedy about a woman, Ellida, and her struggle between her real-life confinement as a second wife and the imaginative hold of her first, secret marriage "to the sea." In a new staging by TBD co-founders Thomas Kapusta and Cody Holliday Haefner, the 133rd Street Arts Center's beautiful Lab space will be transformed into Dr. Wangel's garden, transporting the audience to the play's setting in the fjords of Norway.

The Lady from the Sea features Yonatan Gebeyehu as Ballested, Emily Kaplan as Bolette, Lorenzo Landini as Arnholm, Brian LaPerche as Lyngstrand, Matthew McShane as The Stranger, Daniel O'Neill as Dr. Wangel, Caroline Siewert as Ellida, and Jenny Vallancourt as Hilda, with Set Design by Stephen Davan and Jiin Choi, Costume Design by Ilana Breitman, Sound Design by Jess Malcolm, Lighting Design by Camille Simoneau, Tech Direction by Michael Hsu, Production Stage Management by Alyson Fortner, and Direction by Cody Holliday Haefner and Thomas Kapusta.

The performance schedule for The Lady from the Sea is:

Thursday 11/14/13 - 7:00pm

Friday 11/15/13 - 7:00pm

Saturday 11/16/13 - 2:00pm

Saturday 11/16/13 - 7:00pm

Sunday 11/17/13 - 7:00pm

The Brewing Dept. presents The Lady from the Sea by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Rolf Fjelde and directed by Cody Holliday Haefner and Thomas Kapusta. The show will run November 14th to 17th at the 133rd Street Arts Center Lab, 308 West 133rd Street. Tickets: $15-$18. For tickets visit theladyfromthesea.bpt.me. A limited number of reserved-seating tickets are available by donating to the production on our Indiegogo page - thebrewingdept.org/donate.

Cody Holliday Haefner is a founding member of The Brewing Dept. His directing credits with the company include the world premiere of Sylvia Khoury's The Arab and several developmental readings of Brian LaPerche's Naked. He also assistant directed TBD's recent production of bobrauschenbergamerica. Cody graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Drama and Theater Arts after directing a thesis production of Michael John LaChiusa's Gloryday. Other directing credits include The Connected: Bundle #1 (FringeNYC), The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (Columbia University), bare: a pop opera (Fairport Summer Performing Arts), and a workshop of Nathalie Molina Niño's new play Terremoto (Barnard College).

Thomas Kapusta is a founding member of The Brewing Dept., with whom he directed the world premiere of Jenny Vallancourt's The Living Room, which was nominated for six Festivity Awards at the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, and produced Emily Kaplan's new staging of Chuck Mee's bobrauschenbergamerica. He is a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in History, where he wrote his thesis on the 'resistance theater' of occupied Paris during the Second World War. At Columbia, he directed Shakespeare's Hamlet, Coriolanus, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Dirty Hands. He currently serves as the Assistant Secretary-Treasurer of Royal Shakespeare Company America.

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is one of the greatest dramatists of world literature. His verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) brought him fame in Scandinavia, but he became known throughout the world with twelve prose plays in which he invented what is known as theatrical realism: The Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler(1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken (1889). Ibsen made ordinary people speaking about contemporary topics in the language of everyday life proper subjects for the stage, and in so doing, he earned the title "the father of modern drama." Ibsen is the second-most widely produced dramatist in the world after Shakespeare.

Rolf Fjelde (1926-2002) is America's foremost translator of Ibsen. His Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays (1978) and his verse translation of Peer Gynt (1980) are landmarks in Ibsen studies. In 1978, Fjelde was elected founding President of the Ibsen Society of America, an office he held for fifteen years. Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Fjelde also worked as a poet, playwright, and teacher. He earned degrees from Yale and Columbia Universities, was a founding editor of TheYale Poetry Review and Poetry New York, and taught drama for nearly 50 years at Pratt Institute and the Juilliard School. He was honored by Norway with the Order of St. Olaf, and by his compatriots with membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Brewing Dept. is a collective of theater artists made up of Columbia University graduates from 2011 and 2012 that is committed to separating the definition of artistic success from the idea of a final, polished performance. We aim to make dynamic, living theater by allowing artists the time and creative space to best develop their work. We seek to connect audiences with the creative process and promote a dialogue between artists and audiences before opening night, and continuing beyond the piece's closing performance. The Brewing Dept.'s first cycle of work included two world-premiere productions: Sylvia Khoury's The Arab; and TBD founding member Jenny Vallancourt's The Living Room, which went on to receive 6 Planet Connection Award nominations, and win for Outstanding Ensemble in a Play, Musical, or Evening of One-Acts. We also mounted a series of developmental workshops for Naked, a new play by founding member Brian LaPerche, which was selected for a reading in the Fresh Fruit Festival, NYC's premiere queer arts festival. Most recently, we produced founding member Emily Kaplan's new staging of Chuck Mee's bobrauschenbergamerica, reimagined as a picnic and presented for free in Riverside Park. We're proud to conclude this exciting first cycle with The Lady from the Sea, which features the talents of each of TBD's current artistic board members.

More information about The Lady from the Sea and The Brewing Dept. can be found at thebrewingdept.org and on Facebook at facebook.com/TheBrewingDept. You can follow the show on Twitter @TheBrewingDept with #TheLadyTBD.

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