The Great Jones Repertory Company is the Repertory Company of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village of Manhattan, New York City.
The company is named after Great Jones Street, where La MaMa's rehearsal building is located. As described on their website, the company is an "intergenerational, racially and ethnically diverse ensemble of artists, actors, designers, and musicians whose landmark works remain a significant part of La MaMa’s history." [1]
Great Jones Repertory was founded in 1972 by Elizabeth Swados, Andrei Șerban, and La MaMa founder and artistic director Ellen Stewart. Beginning with Fragments of a Greek Trilogy in 1972, Great Jones has most notably performed a number of Obie Award-winning experimental theatre works based in Greek tragedy.
Other works performed by the company have included Eric Bentley's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Good Woman of Setzuan [2] and repertory productions of Shakespeare's As You Like It between 1976 [3] and 1980. [4]
In 2015, Great Jones Rep premiered Pier Paolo Passolini's "Plyade," directed by Ivica Buljan from Croatia. The Pylade cast featured guest Slovenian actor, Marko Mandić as Pylade with company members Mia Yoo, Perry Yung, Chris Wild, Cary Gant, eugene the poogene, maura nguyen donohue, Valois Mickens, John Gutierrez, and Tunde Sho as Orestes. The work that toured Italy, Portugal, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria in the summer of 2016 was documented by company member donohue at Culturebot The company developed the Italian Motus Theatre directed production Panorama in December 2017 and January 2018 at La MaMa. The piece was based on various autobiographical experiences of members of the company. [5] It was nominated for a NY Innovative Theater Award and toured to various venues in Italy, and to Spain and Germany.
Lanford Wilson was an American playwright. His work, as described by The New York Times, was "earthy, realist, greatly admired [and] widely performed." Wilson helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement with his earliest plays, which were first produced at the Caffe Cino beginning in 1964. He was one of the first playwrights to move from Off-Off-Broadway to Off-Broadway, then Broadway and beyond.
Eric Russell Bentley was a British-born American theater critic, playwright, singer, editor, and translator. In 1998, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. He was also a member of the New York Theater Hall of Fame, recognizing his many years of cabaret performances.
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Elizabeth Swados was an American writer, composer, musician, choreographer, and theatre director. Swados received Tony Award nominations for Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Choreography. She was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Director of a Musical, Outstanding Lyrics, and Outstanding Music, and won an Obie Award for her direction of Runaways in 1978. In 1980, the Hobart and William Smith Colleges awarded her an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters.
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Ivica Buljan is a Croatian theater director, playwright, theater critic, and educator whose work is widely known in Croatia and performed around the globe.
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