What We're Seeing: Troll

Earlier this year, two former Fault Line Theatre interns, Brian Drummy and Jason Modica, co-founded The Rushline Company to produce and artistically engage in satisfying and challenging creative work. Which is why we’re so excited for The Rushline Company’s inaugural production, the world premier of Ken Greller’s new play Troll. Based loosely on the story surrounding the Gawker article Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web, Troll will be performed in a limited run at The Secret Theatre in Long Island City. Congrats Brian and Jason!

April 8 -24, 2016
The Secret Theatre
44-02 23rd Street
Long Island City, NY 11101

A LITTLE ABOUT THE PLAY

Troll tells the story of Ari Jacobs, a young web-journalist who’s uncovered the scoop of a lifetime. An Internet “troll” holds sway over the online community of Reddit, filling its pages with hate, filth, and sex, moderating message boards like “Jailbait” and “Jewmerica” with impunity and seemingly unlimited power. When Ari discovers the real life identity of this troll, he’s faced with the question of whether or not to expose this monster to the world.

Troll, a new play by Ken Greller (Hands, Sundance Theatre Lab), explores the perils of unchecked free speech in the Internet age, where every person has the power to raise their voice. Through crackling scene-work, this vibrant and intense new work forces us to ask ouselves: “Is it okay to destroy someone else’s life to save your own?”

CAST:

• Andrew Block
• Jeffery Delano Davis*
• Brian Drummy
• Reggie D. White*

PRODUCTION TEAM:

• Directed by Jason Modica
• Written by Ken Greller
• Scenic and Projection Design – Bryce Cutler
• Lighting Design – Steve Shack
• Sound Design – Maggie Burke
• Costume Design – Tristan Raines
• Stage Manager – Imogen Taylor

*Appears Courtesy of Actor’s Equity Association

What We're Seeing: Romeo and Juliet

The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit is a wonderful initiative by one of the best theaters in the city to bring Shakespeare’s classic plays to communities across New York City absolutely free of charge. This year, their production of Romeo & Juliet features our buddy Jorge Eliézer Chacón fresh off the heels of our production of Nick Gandiello’s The Wedge Horse. Check out The Public Theater’s website for more info on where this tour will hit in the city!

March 18 – April 9, 2016
The following venues are FREE and open to the public during the Mobile Unit Tour

A LITTLE ABOUT THE PLAY

The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit strengthens community engagement with the arts by bringing free, world-class productions of Shakespeare to communities all across New York City. This season, the Mobile Unit will present Shakespeare’s timeless tale of ROMEO & JULIET. In some of the most romantic language ever written for the stage, young Romeo and Juliet become fortune’s fools when the ancient grudge between their families forces them to sacrifice all for the chance to be together. Obie Award winner Lear deBessonet directs the classic tale of star-cross’d lovers caught between the world outside the bedroom window and passion as boundless as the sea.

CAST:

• Sheldon Best
• Jorge Eliézer Chacón
• Mahira Kakkar
• Maria-Christina Oliveras
• Danny Rivera
• David Ryan Smith
• Marques Toliver
• Max Woertendyke
• Ayana Workman.

PRODUCTION TEAM:

• Directed by Lear deBessonet
• Written By William Shakespeare

Nick Gandiello's Next Play

Nick Gandiello is on fire right now.

Just a few weeks after we closed our production of his New York debut The Wedge Horse, Nick announced that he received the 2015 David Calicchio Emerging American Playwright Prize winner for his play Sunrise Highway. This award is presented by Marin Theatre Company to “a new work that shows outstanding promise and a distinctive new voice for the American theatre.”

Excited to hear more about Sunrise Highway? So are we! Here’s how Nick describes the show:

“Mid-90’s Long Island: an African-American family and an Italian-American family come together in a budding relationship. But when the teenagers in either family discover danger in the relationship between their younger siblings, they make a secret pact that jeopardizes everyone. Identity is stretched across family, race, history, and sexuality in this bittersweet drama.”

Congrats Nick!

What We're Seeing: Bring a Weasel and a Pint of Your Own Blood

Charise Greene, our amazing dialect coach for The Wedge Horse will be appearing in an evening of work written by Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney’s Brooklyn College MFA Playwriting program called the Bring a Weasel and a Pint of Your Own Blood Festival. For an added bonus, the show is costume designed by our very own artistic associate Izzy Fields!

March 17-20, 2016
Jack
505 1/2 Waverly Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11238

A LITTLE ABOUT THE PLAY

Each year, three playwrights in Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney’s Brooklyn College MFA Playwriting program apply their distinct visions to the same source material, coming up with separate beautiful, bizarre, delicate, and disturbing theater pieces, performed together in one evening. This year, John Budge, Zarina Shea, andHeloise Wilson take on Maxim Gorki’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev. Prepare to be dazzled by these weasely writers and their deranged minds.

CAST:

• Eliza Bent
• Charise Greene
• Yehuda Hyman
• Michael Patrick Kane
• Ryan Pater
• Julia Sirna-Frest
• Merlin Whitehawk

PRODUCTION TEAM:

• Directed by Mia Rovegno
• Set – Joe Burkard
• Props – Katie White
• Lights – Jay Maury
• Composer/Sound Designer/Music Director - Ezra Lowrey
• Costumes – Izzy Fields
• Choreography - Katie Rose Mclaughlin
• Stage Manager - Rebecca Guskin
• Assistant Stage Manager - Rafael Vasquez
• Assistant Director - Tara Elliot

Interview With Charise Greene

There are only 5 more opportunities to catch our production of Nick Gandiello’s The Wedge Horse! Good news though, the first 50% of tickets sold each show are 50% off.

If you’ve already seen the show (or read anything on our website or looked at the show’s poster…), you’ll know that it’s set in Baldwin, Long Island. However, none of our actors hail from anywhere close to Long Island.

Charlie is from Kansas City. Jorge is from Colombia via Seattle. Ali is from Minneapolis.

To help our actors through the process, we turned to our friend Charise Greene. An accomplished actor, teacher, and dialect coach, Charise has most recently worked with Golden Globe nominees Dominic West and Ruth Wilson in Showtime’s The Affair. I sat down with Charise recently to chat with her about the role of a dialect coach and how she approaches a new dialect.

What does a voice and dialect coach do?

My job is to primarily help the actor execute her/his choices in the most powerful, clear and healthy way. It is also my responsibility to support the director’s and writer’s vision for the world of the play/film/tv show, which can involve everything from instructing dialect/accent to coaching placement, pitch, rhythm, and speed.

How did you prepare to coach the Baldwin dialect?

Preparation for any project begins with reading the script to get a sense of place, time, style, and tone. Then comes a conversation with either the director or actor who hires me (usually directors hire me for stage and actors request me for film/tv) to assess the artist’s vision. In this case my meeting was with Aaron [Rossini]. Then I went to Baldwin! I spent a day chatting with locals, recording our conversations, and observing the way their particular dialect impacts physicality. I followed up with research online, then created a sound change sheet, and scored the play. A great deal of my work happens before the first rehearsal.

What’s your favorite dialect to perform and/or teach?

What a fun question! I love doing Russian. I find it lives in my body in a satisfying way (maybe comes from my Dad’s people who came from Lithuania? Who knows?). I like to teach the Scandinavian region. The sing-song thing is super fun.

Any advice to actors working on a new dialect?

If it’s your first time doing an accent or dialect, listen to your recordings every day: on the train, while making dinner, while jogging…the more you can listen while living your actual life, the more muscularity will release; it will remind you to breathe fully and thereby integrate the sounds into your body. Then, like everything else, practice practice practice. But remember that they’re called “plays,” so think of it as play time. This will help keep a sense of spontaneity in the work that will free you up when acting. The dialect/accent should illuminate and support intention, rather than stand in the way of it through muscularity.

You’re a professional actor as well. What’s it like balancing these two careers?

I love what I learn about my acting through my coaching and what I learn about my coaching through my acting. It’s a symbiotic relationship that allows me to get deeper and freer in my work with each passing project. Also, I love breathing life into great writing and whether that is through my voice or the voice of those I’m supporting is less relevant than the passion I have for creativity. It’s all the same at the end of the day.

Interview with Nick Gandiello

There’s only about a week and a half left to catch our production of Nick Gandiello’s The Wedge Horse. We sat down with Nick to chat about his process, the people that influence him, and how this play came to life with Fault Line Theatre.

How did your hometown inspire The Wedge Horse?

Baldwin is a town along the Babylon line, which travels the south shore of Long Island’s Nassau County, where some of the richest towns in the country are across streets from some of the poorest.  But as I remember it, ethnicities, classes, and cultures didn’t clash so much as stew together. We were kids; we had different backgrounds, yeah, but we fell in love and fought and worshipped each other, like kids have to do. We hung out on the train platforms, we packed into cars on the highways, we staked out space on the crowded beaches. I think we wanted to be a lot of things that we weren’t.  

New York City was west of us. It felt like it was just past eyeshot but somehow way beyond reach. It was like an unbearably cool older cousin who you saw sparingly and desperately wanted to be around.  Then you get older and you see a lot of pain in something that used to be untouchable.

I think The Wedge Horse was a way to explore what perplexes me most about the world through places and people that I know in my bones.

What excites you about this group of collaborators? 

Fault Line Theatre thrives on a fascination with plays as live events, and that’s where the work starts.  In one of the earliest workshops of The Wedge Horse, we had almost the full design team there, turning over the text. We had been discussing the setting, trying to imagine the train station, then on a break I saw that I had an email. Tristan Jeffers [set designer] had been researching as we talked, and he had sent us a handful of photos of the train platform to help us visualize it. Fault Line Theatre buzzes with an excitement about how the play moves through time and space with the audience.

Working through the story with Aaron [Rossini] and the actors, we get giddy, angry, and sad – then go back to technique to turn all of that into drama. There are long, impassioned discussions about the world, then concentrated efforts to turn that into moments on stage. Fault Line Theatre fosters a collaboration full of excitement and feeling that is anchored by discipline and craft.

How does the political climate affect your writing? 

When horrible things happen around us, we end up with a lot of excess fear and sadness that don’t fit nicely into workaday life.  Politicians almost routinely fail to help us process those emotions into society, but politics is how we try to do it anyway, kicking and screaming.  And we may be becoming experts on making enemies of each other as we try to make sense of it all.  

I write a play when something happens in the world that is too upsetting to just carry on with, and I feel myself seeking enemies. I need to put what disturbs me right there in the middle of it, then find a path toward empathy. So, when the political climate reaches peak controversy, and seems to present enemies to blame for my fear and sadness, I write to find a different way to use those emotions.

Who are your favorite writers?

My favorite playwrights are Caryl Churchill, Conor McPherson, Simon Stephens, and Christopher Shinn.  My favorite novelists are Jennifer Egan, Evie Wyld, JM Coetzee, and Katherine Dunn.

What We're Seeing: Fen

While our production of The Wedge Horse goes on in the main space upstairs at IATI Theater, downstairs in the Black Box Theater, our friends in the Red Garnet Theater Company in association with Tin Lily Productions will be performing Caryl Churchill’s 1983 play Fen. Why not make a day of it and catch both plays on the same day on either Saturday, February 13th or 20th with a matinee of The Wedge Horse at 2pm and an evening performance of Fen at 8pm? We can’t really think of a better way to spend a cold, winter-y Saturday!

Feb. 11 – Feb. 21, 2016
IATI Theater – Black Box Theater
64 E 4th St
New York, NY 10003

A LITTLE ABOUT THE PLAY

“…I’ve seen women working my fields with icicles on their faces. I admire that…”

On the Fens, work is a way of life. Labor is passed down from generation to generation. Numbed by the cyclical nature inherent in managing the day to day, a community of working women have no time to look beyond the fields. But when Val, a young mother of two, decides to leave her family for her lover, her impulsion runs smack into obligation. It’s hard to start a new life without leaving the village. There’s always another job to be done. There is barely enough money to live. There are children to raise. It does not take long for the bonds of motherhood to bring Val back to the fields. She comes to understand that there is no escaping the Fen. It is both a comfort and a curse.

In a world where roles are fixed and choices are few, Fen follows the interweaving lives of different generations of women, and questions our sense of entitlement as to what life should give us.

CAST:

• Annie Branson
• Katie Consamus*
• Lauren Lubow*
• Aimee Rose Ranger
• David Rudi Utter*
• Lizzie Vieh*

PRODUCTION TEAM:

• Written by Caryl Churchill
• Directed by Patricia Lynn
• Assistant Director/Stage Manager: Michael Witkes
• Lighting Design: Sarah Stolnack
• Sound Design: Marc Jablonski
• Set Design Consultant: Allyson Lubow
• Costume Design: Patricia Lynn
• Associate Producer: Annie Branson
• Dialect Coach: Lizzie King-Hall

*Indicates a member of Actors’ Equity.

The Wedge Horse opens...

“Mr. Gandiello has a fine sense of rhythm and an avowed love of hip-hop…the playwright generously shares his irrepressible devotion to language.” – The New York Times

At long last, The Wedge Horse officially opens this evening at 8pm.

Due to a massively successful week of previews, we are happy to offer the first 50% of tickets sold each night at 50% off. That’s only $15 for off-Broadway theatre.

Video by Good Baby Films

The Wedge Horse - Week 4

We’ve now come to the end of tech week for The Wedge Horse and can’t wait to step into previews to begin sharing this play with you!

This week, over the course of about 48 hours, we recorded the construction of the set designed by Tristan Jeffers. Enjoy!

Reminder, tickets are on sale now!

Video by Good Baby Films

What We're Seeing: Destiny and the Little Man

Looking for the ultimate night out? A new group called Nightcap Riot has you covered. For 16 performances only, Nightcap Riot will combine craft cocktails, live music, and live theatre to create one unforgettable night out. The Play, an adaption of George Bernard Shaw’s The Man of Destiny, stars our very own co-artistic director Craig Wesley Divino as Napoleon Bonaparte. We love drinks, theatre, and music more than just about anything else in the world… this one is right up out ally! We’ll see you there.

Jan. 15 – Feb. 14, 2016
Magick City
37 Box St.
Brooklyn, NY 11222

A LITTLE ABOUT THE PLAY

Destiny and the Little Man is Jim Knable’s ferocious and hilarious battle of wits between a 26-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte and a mysterious lady who may or may not be a ruthless Viennese spy. Nightcap Riot is thrilled to present Knable’s world premiere adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Man of Destiny”, an Equity Approved Showcase, directed by Bruce Levitt.

CAST:

• Craig Wesley Divino*
• Ariel Nichole Reid*
• Ryan Salvato
• Ben Williams*

PRODUCTION TEAM:

• Written by Jim Knable
• Directed by Bruce Levitt

*Indicates a member of Actors’ Equity.