PAST PROJECTS

Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards

Directed by Lear deBessonet
Songs composed and performed by Kelley McRae
Presented in special arrangement with the Culture Project

Director Lear deBessonet reinvents Brecht's savage masterpiece with tight choreography and seductive Country and Blues. Transplanted into a richly imagined and anachronistic 1920s Chicago, and with live original music by country/blues singer Kelley McRae, intrepid St. Joan and her Slaughterhouse King weave a cautionary tale for the 21st Century. Can youth, hope, and faith survive in a world of greed and corruption?

BONE PORTRAITS
Walkerspace, May 2006

Directed by Lear deBessonet; Written by Deborah Stein
Co-Created with the Ensemble

In 1895, a hapless inventor stumbles upon a light that burns through skin. In a flash, the x-ray is born. Examining 19th century inventiveness through 21st century technology, BONE PORTRAITS slams together old-time vaudeville, video & film, gothic horror, and sweeping romance to take us back to this moment of discovery, when the world split open like an atom, and nothing could ever be the same.

DEATH MIGHT BE YOUR SANTA CLAUS
February 17-21, 2006

Conceived and Directed by Lear deBessonet, Created by the Ensemble, with additional text by Juliana Francis. Site-specific production in conjunction with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council at 15 Nassau, an abandoned bank next door to the New York Stock Exchange,

A new play exploring the extremes of suffering and prosperity in America inspired by the New Yorker article 'God Doesn't Need Ole Anthony.' Pivoting around Ole Anthony, a 68 year old man in Dallas who leads a group of former homeless and addicts in undercover spy operation to expose televangelist fraud, the play investigates the intersection of faith and capitalism in contemporary America. Sources include All My Sons, the testimonies of lightning victims, the faith-based merchandise department at Wal-Mart, the oncology ward, internet prayer circles, dumpster diving, natural disasters, 1940s musicals, and just about everything involving TammyFaye.

REVISIONS
October 2005

Workshopped at the Focus Theatre, Dublin

Created by an ensemble composed of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and America, REVISIONS investigated the changing face of contemporary Irish identity with writer/performer Megan Riordan. Inspired by text from the performer's personal narratives, Irish folk tales, and newspaper articles.

BITE YOUR TONGUE
2005

NYU Graduate Acting

Bite Your Tongue was a one-woman performance piece about Southern women and their primal instincts. Created from A Streetcar Named Desire, Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, Gone With the Wind, Appetites, Emily Post, and the creators' own experiences.

THE ELIOTS
2004

Center Stage, NY

The Eliots was a new performance piece created from the lives and works of Vivienne and T.S. Eliot. Provoked by the recent biography Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth About Her Influence on His Genius by Carole Seymour Jones, the play was created collaboratively from text by Caridad Svich and the Eliots' writings. Through a collage of text and movement, The Eliots responded to the scope and cadence of Eliot's language, his spiritual acuity, and his baffling personal life.

THE FEMALE TERRORIST PROJECT
2004

Co-Production with The Committee, HERE Arts Center, The American Living Room

A new play by Ken Urban examining the phenomenon of female terrorists, created from interviews with female terrorists (Shoot the Women First), Army of Roses, the SCUM Manifesto, recently unclassified documents from the Israeli Security Forces, and the 1999 Report by the U.S. Government, "Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why."

L'HISTOIRE DU CANARD: A Surrealist History of Truth in 20th Century America
2004

NYU Graduate Acting

Created collaboratively with Mike Crane, Manoel Felciano, Adam Green, and Emily Swallow to explore the extremities of lies: the beautiful, the treacherous, the necessary. Sources: This American Life, Life Magazine advertisements from the 1940s, Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (by Binjamin Wilkomirski), Umberto Eco's Baudolino, South Pacific, and partial truths about such things as Area 51, Michael Jackson, the War of the Worlds, and Tasti-D-Lite.

TRANSFIGURES
2003

Calvary Church, NYC

A new play inspired by the latest theories in neurotheology (the brain science of spiritual ecstasy) and the phenomenon of Type III Jerusalem Syndrome, a strange 5-7 day psychosis that affects tourists in Jerusalem (always following the same 7 steps, which include the victim channeling a Biblical figure, creating a toga out of their hotel bed-sheets, and parading through Jerusalem preaching). Created from sources as varied as Ibsen's The Lady and the Sea and post-it notes from the desks of New York corporate secretaries, transFigures skipped from New York to Jerusalem, from Joan of Arc to abortion clinic terrorists, to map the intersection of religious revelation and insanity.

IN THE DARK AGES
2003

The National Opera and Ballet Theatre of Kazakhstan,

A new tri-lingual musical created from the war poetry of Bertolt Brecht, directed for the National Opera Theatre of Kazakhstan.