Celebrating the life and art of Václav Havel
New York City, October through December 2006

Biographies: Companies

The Brick Theater
The Brick and its company, The Brick Theater, Inc. were founded in September of 2002 by Robert Honeywell and Michael Gardner.  Formerly an auto-body shop, a yoga space and various storage spaces, this brick walled garage was completely refurbished into a state-of-the-art dance/theater complex, with a large sprung floor and professional lighting and sound package. Since then, The Brick has produced many original productions and festivals. Festivals include THE SUMMER THEME FESTIVAL SERIES (The Hell Festival (2004), The Moral Values Festival (2005), The $ellout Festival (2006) and next year’s entry, The Pretentious Festival).  The Brick is also producer of the annual New York Clown Theatre Festival and a member of The New WPA (Williamsburg Performance Alliance, www.newwpa.org). Among The Brick’s numerous critically acclaimed premiere productions, are The Kung Fu Importance of Being Earnest, Greed: A Musical Love $tory, Adventures of Caveman Robot, The Bizarre Science Fantasy series, The True Life Story of [YOUR NAME HERE], Who is Wilford Brimley?, The Bouffon Glass Menajoree, Dear DUBYA: Jenna is Nuts, In a Strange Room (based on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying), World Gone Wrong, FLAT, Assurbanipal Babilla’s Assyrian Monkey Fantasy and Polish playwright Witkiewicz’s The Pragmatists. The Brick’s long-running short-work and play development series, Brick-a-Brac, continues every first Sunday of the month at 7 p.m. For more information and to join the email mailing list, please visit www.bricktheater.com.

Cardinal Stage Company
Cardinal Stage Company is dedicated to the establishment of a professional, not-for-profit theatre company in Bloomington, Indiana. Cardinal produces vital interpretations of established classics and develops and produces original material of local interest and national importance. Led by artistic director Randy White, Cardinal scouts impassioned and exceptional theater artists and then champions their efforts; Cardinal holds that inspiring work happens when artists lead.

Cardinal aims to establish itself as an artistic and economic resource for the South-Central Indiana region. Cardinal’s launched last season with an acclaimed production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town: “ a show that connects viscerally with its audience — merging Our Town into our town ... a powerful opening statement for the new Cardinal Stage Company.” (Bloomington’s Herald-Times) Upcoming projects include A Year With Frog and Toad, Amadeus, Cyrano and On Words and Onwards, a new musical comedy about the evolution of language in early hominids by Glen Berger (Underneath The Lintel) and Frank London (the Klezmatics).

Cardinal is also committed to the development of local talent through our training and innovative mentoring programs. The company aims to cultivate a lifelong passion for theater in audiences of diverse ages, cultures and economic backgrounds.

With a nod to the state bird — Cardinalis cardinalis — Bloomington's newest theatre organization is determined to live up to its dictionary definition: "Cardinal: of prime importance — of Cardinal significance."

Evolve Company
has been playing with
puppets very seriously for the past ten years. Productions include Evolution (at HERE Arts Center, The Puppeteers of America National Festival and The Looking Glass Theatre, among other venues), the puppet film The Jack O'Lantern Lady, the 24/7 Festival's Lifelines, NEUROfest's The Boy Who Wanted to be a Robot, and the upcoming Secrets History Remembers. They are devoted to the promotion of puppetry as a viable art form for people of all ages.

FHB Productions
FHB Theater Productions is committed to producing high quality theater. All of our productions are created in the hopes of inspiring cultural education and human understanding. We promote talented new playwrights, directors, actors and designers interested in cultural and political subjects.

Gemini CollisionWorks
GCW was founded by multidisciplinary artist Ian W. Hill in 1997 as an umbrella title for his work in various media. Theatrically, the company is dedicated to the collision of various traditional theatrical and non-theatrical artistic forms and ideas within the performance space, which allow for virtuous gaps in the Work to appear. Gaps into which the audience can project itself, learning and finding with us new ways of experiencing the worlds of feeling, thought, action, interaction, science, rationalism, belief, irrationalism, and spirit through the manipulation of text, space, sound, light, setting, and performance in a theatrical Totality. As collaborators in these Works, the interpreter-workers involved strive to present images and feelings of a world that transcends ours, or reflections of a world that must be transcended, through all aspects available to us in our Art. Reconstruction, not deconstruction. GCW is now Ian W. Hill (arts) and Berit Johnson (crafts) and a rotating crew of about 50 vaguely-affiliated actors.

Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the Barnard College Theatre Department

Makor
The Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y is dedicated to enriching the lives of New Yorkers via a variety of cultural programs. Makor’s diverse offerings include theater, music and film events as well as classes, lectures and community service activities. The Makor Theater Program presents performances, staged readings, musical theater events and interviews featuring skilled theater artists from Broadway and beyond. Event participants have included Wendy Wasserstein, Neil LaBute, Christopher Durang, Olympia Dukakis, Bebe Neuwirth, David Strathairn, Arthur Miller, Chazz Palminteri, Craig Lucas, Anthony Rapp, Paul Rudd, Jason Biggs, Cherry Jones, New York Musical Theater Festival and the New York Fringe Festival. The Makor Theater Program has introduced the work of both established and rising artists to a wide range of spectators, and has garnered attention from media entities including The New York Times, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, New York Magazine and Backstage. Plays that received their first reading or performance at Makor have subsequently been produced on Broadway and at venues including Theater J, Ensemble Studio Theater, 78th Street Playhouse, H.B. Playwrights, Queens Theater in the Park, and in the New York International Fringe Festival. www.makor.org

Oracle Theater
A 501(c)3 non-profit theatre co. founded in 2001, seeks to present old stories and mythologies in new and innovative theatrical methods. Tantalizing all ages with legends, fables, literature, and more, the goal is to better educate the community about various cultures. Through new works, old stories, and anything that embodies a full spirit, the presentations incorporate different types of visual/audio displays with live action. Programs include: WORLD ORACLES, LEGENDS, & FOLKLORE (WOLF) FAMILY SERIES; TRUTH BE TOLD: A Workshop Collaboration Series; PLAYWRIGHT’S FORUM; WORKSHOPS in Theatre Arts and Crafts; and PRODUCTIONS of Traditional/Nontraditional Theatre. In addition to The Garden Party and Mistake, Oracle Theatre, Inc. has recently produced Breakfast For Dinner, as part of The New York International Fringe Festival 2006. For more info. about the Festivals, check out the website under “Productions & More.” www.oracletheatreinc.com

Piper McKenzie Productions

Soho Think Tank
Soho Think Tank is the OBIE Award winning theatre company that has been producing, presenting, and programming new work at the Ohio Theatre (NYC) since 1994.  The Ohio Theatre is widely recognized as an indispensable pillar of the downtown theatre community. 

Nomad Theatrical Company

True Comedy Theatre
True Comedy Theatre Company has for over 20 years produced original plays and performance art works in New York City—comedies that provoke thoughtful laughter, humanize, expose folly to ridicule, encourage audiences to both think and imagine, promote the cause of civilization, and give theatrical and mythic form to the present and the great traditions of the past—with productions of works by Eugene Ionesco, Richard Foreman, Jim Neu and William Niederkorn, and directors such as Keith McDermott and Yolanda Hawkins. The company is happy to be participating again in a festival under the UTC61 umbrella.

TYNA Collective
TYNA Collective is the formalization of artistic relationships that have developed over the past several years. The founding members met and worked together in key collaborative experiences: the late Joe Chaikin's Workshop; Artistic Director Eva Burgess's artist residence at HERE Arts Center; and a production of Russian playwright, Ksenia Dragunskaya's Feeling of a Beard. In these experiences, Ms. Burgess developed an ensemble process, and actors, designers, and artists with whom her approach resonated began to identify themselves. This background, along with a drive to use an ensemble-based, collaborative process, led the founding members to form TYNA Collective.

UTC61

Untitled Theater Company #61
Untitled Theater Company #61 is dedicated to a contemporary Theater of the Absurd. We present classic Absurdist works as well as new plays that embrace the Absurdist aesthetic: A theater of ideas; a theater using comedy to portray tragedy; a theater that exalts in theatricality. Some of our previous theatrical events have included the Ionesco Festival, the first-ever complete festival of Eugene Ionesco's work, the NEUROfest, a festival of plays examining neurological conditions, and our 24/7 Festival. Recent plays we have produced include the Off-Broadway play Fairy Tales of the Absurd (“almost unbearably funny” — The New York Times), Strangers and Linguish (“inspired absurdist comedy” — The Village Voice) and Unauthorized Magic (“exquisitely ingenious” — The New York Times). We have also produced work by playwrights such as Richard Foreman, Bertolt Brecht, Tom Stoppard, Slawomir Mrozek, T. S. Eliot and Aristophanes.

WalkingShadow

Works Productions

Works Productions
Works Productions is an award-winning multi-discipline production company based in New York City that focuses on the develop.m.ent of new material, cross-media adaptation and imaginative storytelling. As we approach each project, our focus is on evocative and compelling production that utilizes story-appropriate presentation and media. Founded in 1999, Works Productions has reaped critical acclaim most recently for it’s uniquely styled physical and vocal adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, lending a distinctly modern vision to this arguably greatest of American novels, and garnered Drama Desk nominations for Outstanding Play, Outstanding Director of a Play and Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play. Moby Dick was also distinguished as the first Off-Off Broadway production to ever garner nods in the Play and Director categories in the 50 years of the Drama Desk Award. True to it’s mission of story-appropriate production, Works recently presented productions of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (featuring actor Martin Epstein backed by a 24 piece orchestra) and Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera The Telephone (featuring soprano Deborah Schmidt). Works also recently won the Roy W. Dean Documentary Film Award for it’s documentary feature film The Franklin Cover-Up. For more information, please check out www.WORKSproductions.com.

Sponsored by:
The Village Voice nytheatre.com