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"The Foundry Theatre has excellent vision. Whether ceding the stage to an early career artist or supporting a mid-career one, the Foundry has championed remarkable theatremakers who challenge and complicate what we consider a play." The Village Voice 11 OBIE Awards 4 DRAMA DESK Nominations The Peter Zeisler Award
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2010 WRITTEN & PERFORMED BY DAVID GREENSPAN DIRECTED BY BRIAN MERTES Performed at The Atlantic Theater 2 THE MYOPIA is a comedy about
Barclay who is secretly writing a play about his father, Febus who is
struggling to finish a musical about Warren G. Harding that features
his grandmother, Yetti, his mother, a Jewish Rapunzel named Koreen,
Mrs. Harding, the 16 U.S. Senators in a smoke-filled room and a cameo
performance from Carol Channing. This entire cavalcade
is erformed by one character, our Raconteur for the evening, who
in turn is performed by the inimitable David Greenspan from a single armchair on a
bare stage. An hilarious Escher painting in theatrical form, THE
MYOPIA celebrates the remarkable power of imagination in us all.
"The Myopia is nothing short of revolutionary. No one is like Greenspan ... a one-man cabinet of wonders. Anyone can stage pictures but so few can bedazzle the mind's eye." TimeOut NY "You emerge from this production feeling dazzled and disoriented, as if you'd just seen a splashy Disney musical crossed with a Greek tragedy and a kitchen-sink drama, or an evening of Samuel Beckett plays as staged by Florenz Ziegfeld. Greenspan fills the imagination of the audience with images of pathos and comedy, of fantasy and absurdity, that leaves a fizzy sense of excitement, the giddy elation that follows a great fireworks display." The New York Times MYOPIA // PLAYS website : Here |
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2009 CREATED BY MELANIE JOSEPH & CLAUDIA RANKINE Performed on a tour bus traveling through the South Bronx THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY is a poetic travelogue performed on a bus touring the South Bronx; the audience boards the bus in East Harlem, puts on headphones and crosses Willis Ave. Bridge, and for 90 minutes eavesdrops on the voice -- live and recorded -- of this historic place. Rankine's evocative text points out and reflects upon the sites that pass by outside the windows; views that to an outsider might go by unnoticed -- a factory dressed up as townhouses, the theatre where La Lupe once held court, now a pentacostal church -- complicated places that ask what creates a neighborhood in a city in a country in the world. PROVENANCE is a theatrical experiemce that both responds to and redoubles the landscape, mapping out a poetic cartography of a neighborhood -- of any neighborhood -- in its eternal state of evolution.
"PROVENANCE makes the bustle outside the bus throb with history, mystery and meaning, as the best of live performances do. An elegant theatrical meditation on a pocket of the city you might never think of exploring " The New York Times
The enterprising Foundry Theatre has outdone itself. PROVENANCE is a journey you will never quite forget. The New York Post |
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2009 Winner of 2 OBIE Awards: Best Direction & Best Performance TELEPHONE, by poet Ariana Reines, is a nocturne about invention and love, inspired by "The Telephone Book," by Avital Ronell. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson presented their invention to the public, vaudeville-style, in theatres. TELEPHONE begins with both of them onstage again, but their task is more complicated than it used to be. A biography of the phone and a meditation on the nature of the disembodied voice, TELEPHONE operates like a switchboard connecting places and people across time and space. Miss St (Jung?s notorious schizophrenic madwoman) takes over in act two, she suffers the slander of invisible telephones and tells you all about it. Finally, act three, people who love each other make cell phone phone-calls. Reines? TELEPHONE is a delicate and tender yet ferociously poetic work that asks what it means to 'take a call' not knowing what or who might be on the other end.
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2008 OPEN HOUSE was a small play about the big city ? small enough to be performed in living rooms throughout all 5 boroughs of New York City and big enough to ask how we live in our city now, and into the future. the play follows two narratives: the evocative sales pitch of a real estate salesman named Three; and the story of Rick and Jane, a young couple trying to figure out how to sustain a relationship, start a family and live as active members of a city that is out of control.Set against the backdrop of turbo gentrification, rising rents, and the insecurity of urban living, Open House asks how we can participate in the ongoing evolution of our city.
"Aaron Landsman has a dry, subversive wit" -The New York Times "bleakly funny and elegaic" -Time Out NY |
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| 2008 ETIQUETTE CREATED BY ROTOZAZA Performed At Veselka Restaurant, NYC "Staged" at a table in a working restaurant and delivered entirely through headphones, two synchronized soundtracks transforms two audience members per performance into a young girl and an aging philosopher. As the piece unfolds, they are lead through a series of situations, where the bubble shared between the "characters" splits and re-forms incessantly. At one moment, you may be in a separate world from your partner, the next joined together in a kind of engineered conversation, where audience and performer roles are imperceptibly assumed and exchanged. Etiquette exposes human communication at both its rawest and its most delicate, exploring the difficulty of turning our thoughts into words we can trust.
"Etiquette makes the point, quite creatively, that every conversation is a performance." -The New York Times |
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2007 Playing fast and loose with West African myths, The Brothers Size brings contemporary rhythms together with traditions of ceremonial presentation to tell the modern-day story of the Size brothers - Ogun, an auto mechanic, and Oshoosi, a recent parolee. This breakout hit from our 2007 Under The Radar Festival is an imaginatively fresh new drama, in which the audience is at once the community, the witness and the judge. "Listen closely, and you might hear that thrilling sound that is one of the main reasons you go the theater, that beautiful music of a new voice." -The New York TimesPRODUCED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE FOUNDRY PRODUCERS CHAIR PROGRAM |
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2006 Part suspense thriller, part magic act, part instructional seminar, MAJOR BANG is a dark and comic take on our new era of global (in)security. Sprung from the contents of a backpack left on the subway, the piece samples Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and the true story of David Hahn, a boy scout who built a nuclear reactor in his parents' garage to earn his Atomic Energy Badge. The result is a 75-minute ride through 21st century concepts of fear- both real and manufactured. "MAJOR BANG proves that laughter in the dark need not be desperate. This Foundry production is surely the happiest show to have been inspired by the horrors of 9/11." -The New York Times "MAJOR BANG never shies away from how scared we actually are." -The New York Sun MAJOR BANG website : HERE |
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| 2005 K.I. FROM CRIME BY DANIL GINK DIRECTED BY KAMA GINKAS The explosive, haunting "K.I. from 'Crime'" depicts the last living moments of Katerina Ivanovna, a character drawn from the margins of "Crime and Punishment". K.I. performs to an audience of 'guests' at a memorial for her recently deceased husband. Penniless, K.I. sees the encroaching despair his death will bring to her life and the lives of her children. The audience soon discovers that this "memorial" is not for her husband, it is for her own soul. A signature work from renowned Russian director Kama Ginkas, "K.I. From 'Crime'" features a virtuosic central performance by Oksana Mysina, who all but channels Dostoyevsky's timeless investigation into the persecution of the human spirit. Performed in Russian. "...visceral, beyond language, the consummate expression of an unfathomable need." -The New Yorker "Raw, masterly stagecraft that leaves you aghast, with a renewed sense of theater as art." -Time Out NY "[A] kind of vehement clarity. Ginkas has a commanding theatrical vision." -The New York Times |
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2004 "A smart, cutting adaptation ... so much spice, it seems exotic." -The New York Times "A lively playful inteligence energizes the Roaring Girle." -New York Newsday ROARING GIRLE website : HERE |
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| 2002 TALK BY CARL HANCOCK RUX DIRECTED BY MARION McCLINTON Performed at The Public Theater Winner of 2 OBIE Awards: Best Production & Best Performance In the age of McCarthy and the Beat poets, controversial African-American artist Archer Aymes became an overnight sensation for his first book, "Mother and Son"; ten turbulent years later he was found dead in a prison cell. Tonight, five panelists convene to uncover the meaning of Aymes' legacy. Commissioned in response to The Foundry's "Conference on Hope", Talk is a fierce exploration of identity and the struggle to maintain an original voice, from an artist The New York Times called "One of 30 Artists Under 30 Most Likely to Influence Culture for Another 30 Years." "Original, provocative, and entertaining... One of the
best evenings this season." "The most ambitious play in years. Talk wins the case
for a renewed theatre of ideas." -TimeOut NY |
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2001 "Smart, spirited ... pulsing with verve and ingenuity." -The New York Times "Stylish, dangerous fun ... a witty rip-roaring, mad 75 minutes of theater." -New York Post
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2000 OBIE Award Winner
for Best Performance Drama Desk Nomination for "Unique Theatrical
Experience" An extraordinary and haunting musical adventure into the psyche of an artist, And God Created Great Whales follows a gifted composer on a quest to finish his opus: an opera based on Moby Dick. Desperately fighting the advance of a disease eating away at his memory, he is forced to rely on a tape recorder hung around his neck, each day pressing "Play" and hearing yesterday's instructions to himself. One is overwhelmed by the power of quest and loss and by the beauty of the music." - The New York Times "It made me feel alive at a time when little in the musical theater does." -The Village Voice |
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1999 OBIE Award Winner for Best Performance GLAAD Media Award Nominee Composed entirely from Stein's plays, texts, and letters, this moving piece explored the ways in which Stein's work emerged from her "daily life" with Toklas. "Stage with poetic precision and beautifully conceived." -The New York Times "Perceptive, humorous ... another sterling premiere from The Foundry Theatre." -The Star Ledger |
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1998 Winner of 2 OBIE Awards: Best Production & Best Performance Part shopping trip, part haunting, all play, The Race of the Ark Tattoo takes place inside a mysterious, idiosyncratic flea market run by Mr. P. Foster, who is selling the artifacts of his deceased foster father. Each object in the flea market offers its own story, and each performance is different as the order of these stories is determined by the random selection of objects from the salvaged "story ark." The audience discovers that this flea market is, in effect, a mausoleum - a repository for the memories of Foster's own life within the relics of his father's. "... a terrific concoction that calls up searing fear and pity." -The New York Times "one of the rarest theatrical sights in our "seen-it-all age." -The New York Press "Nothing quite like it has appeared before on the American stage; to fully honor its originality means entering the theater knowing no more than you should go." -South End Press |
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1997 Drama Desk nominee for
"Most Original Theatrical Experience" Hot Mouth is a post-modern oratorio for a cappella voices, fusing Yoruba chants with jazz and field hollers with funk. With infectious harmonies and intoxicating rhythms, the highly theatrical, often ironic performance leads to deeper considerations of identity, communication, and even meaning itself. "Lively and inventive, HOT MOUTH pushes the boundaries of theater." -The New York Times "A swift, well-designed 70 minutes of almost indesribably melodic madness." -TimeOut New York |
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1995 Drama Desk nominee for "Most Original Theatrical Experience" Mr. Snow runs the theatre program at The Phlogiston Foundation, a fictional reformatory for women who have committed violent crimes but who have remarkable aptitudes in science, technology and art. The audience arrives expecting to see the inmates perform The Tempest, but on this night, the performance is delayed when the wrong costumes and props arrive for the performance. Events will arise from this mishap that forever alter the course of The Tempest, the prisoners' lives and our own notions of creativity. "Rigorously metaphysical ... rough magic has never been more raw, more visionary." -The Village Voice "Watching Hancock's elaborate environmental piece, DEVIANT CRAFT, is like cutting into what looks like an ordinary cake and discovering that it has twenty layers, each with a different flavor and consistency. Don't ask what kind of cake it is. Just dig in." -The New York Times |
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1994 Equal parts folk art museum, lecture, and "happening," Cartography invites its audience into a traveling museum featuring the collected works of Mike, an itinerant folk artist. The museum is curated by David Hancock, who since the Mike's death has retraced his peregrinations across America, retrieving his idiosyncratic art and poetry from diners, gas stations, rest areas, shops, and private homes. At the end of the museum visit, a "play" is revealed, creating a reality-inside-a-reality which leaves audiences to reflect on the intersection of truth and imagination?and to reconsider the relationship of art to society. "From the tactile to the analytical ... a precious feast for all the senses." -The Village Voice "One of the most arresting pieces I've seen ... a tantalizing new wrinkle in the art of participation. " -New York Newsday |
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