The Emperor Jones is a 1920 tragic play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill that tells the tale of Brutus Jones, a resourceful, self-assured African American and a former Pullman porter, who kills another black man in a dice game, is jailed, and later escapes to a small, backward Caribbean island where he sets himself up as emperor. The play recounts his story in flashbacks as Brutus makes his way through the jungle in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.
The Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy, written by the Athenian playwright Euripides during his final years in Macedonia, at the court of Archelaus I of Macedon. It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BC as part of a tetralogy that also included Iphigeneia at Aulis and Alcmaeon in Corinth, and which Euripides' son or nephew is assumed to have directed. It won first prize in the City Dionysia festival competition.
The Wooster Group is an experimental theater company based in New York City known for creating numerous original dramatic works. It gradually emerged from Richard Schechner's The Performance Group (1967–1980) during the period from 1975 to 1980. The group took its name in 1980; the independent productions of 1975–1980 are retroactively attributed to the group.
Richard Foreman is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art institution located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. As the organization undergoes a multi-year renovation it is currently sited at a satellite loft space in the West Village located at 163B Bank Street, where exhibitions and performances are regularly held. It was founded in Greenwich Village in 1971 by Steina and Woody Vasulka, who were frustrated at the lack of an outlet for video art. The space takes its name from the original location, the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center which was the only available place for the artists to screen their video pieces. Although first intended as a location for the exhibition of video art, The Kitchen soon expanded its mission to include other forms of art and performance, and incorporated as a not-for-profit arts organization in 1973. In 1974, The Kitchen relocated to a building at the corner of Wooster and Broome Streets in SoHo. In 1987 it moved to its current location in Manhattan, New York City.
Elizabeth LeCompte is an American director of experimental theater, dance, and media. A founding member of The Wooster Group, she has directed that ensemble since its emergence in the late 1970s.
The Flea Theater is a theater in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It presents primarily experimental theatre by Black, brown, and queer artists, as well as a venue for film stars to act on a 74-seat stage. The theater was founded in 1996 by Jim Simpson, Sigourney Weaver, Mac Wellman, and Kyle Chepulis. The Flea earned early acclaim for original productions of post-9-11 play The Guys and political works by A. R. Gurney. According to the New York Times, "Since its inception in 1996, The Flea has presented over 100 plays and numerous dance and live music performances. Under Artistic Director Jim Simpson and Producing Director Carol Ostrow, The Flea is one of New York’s leading off-off-Broadway companies."
Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and editor of TDR: The Drama Review.
Ron Vawter was an American actor and a founding member of the experimental theater company The Wooster Group. Vawter performed in most of the group's works until his death from a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 45.
Kate Valk is a founding member of The Wooster Group, a collective of artists who make new work for the theater. Kate Valk began her work with the group in 1979 while she was a student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
The Performance Group (TPG) was an experimental theater troupe that Richard Schechner founded in 1967 in New York City. TPG's home base was the Performing Garage in the SoHo district of Lower Manhattan. After 1975, tensions led to Schechner's resignation in 1980. The troupe reinvented itself as The Wooster Group under the leadership of director and theatre artist Elizabeth LeCompte.
John McDowell Wellman, is an American playwrighter, author, and poet. He is best known for his experimental work in the theater which rebels against theatrical conventions, often abandoning such traditional elements as plot and character altogether. In 1990, he received an Obie Award for Best New American Play. In 1991, he received another Obie Award for Sincerity Forever. He has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award, and the 2003 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement, as well as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2003).
New York City Players is a not-for-profit New York City-based experimental theatre company founded in 1999 by playwright and director Richard Maxwell to present his work. The company has produced approximately 30 new plays in New York and has toured in over 20 countries. Among their notable productions are Ode to the Man Who Kneels and People Without History, the latter at the Performing Garage in SoHo, Manhattan. The company's works have also been presented at Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, and Soho Rep in New York, and in Paris, Brussels, Dublin, London, and Germany.
Brooks Barry McNamara (1937–2009) was an American theater historian, professor, and contributing editor of The Drama Review.
"Speculations: An Essay on the Theater" is a treatise by experimental playwright Mac Wellman. It was published with the collection of plays entitled The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. It is also available, with additional material not included in the book, on Wellman's website.
Dionysus in 69 was a theatrical production directed and conceived by Richard Schechner, founder and longtime artistic director of the Performance Group (TPG), a New York-based experimental theater troupe. An adaptation of The Bacchae by Greek playwright Euripides, Dionysus in 69 was an example of Schechner's practice of site-specific theatre, utilizing space and the audience in such ways as to bring them in close contact with each other. Dionysus in 69 challenged notions of the orthodox theater by deconstructing Euripides' text, interpolating text and action devised by the performers, and involving the spectators in an active and sensory artistic experience. Brian de Palma, Bruce Joel Rubin, and Robert Fiore made a film of Dionysus, merging footage from the final two performances of the play in July 1969.
Ted Stamm (1944–1984) was an American minimalist and conceptualist artist.
Marianne Weems is the artistic director of the New York-based Obie Award-winning performance and media company, The Builders Association, https://thebuildersassociation.org/ founded in 1994. She is a director of theater and opera and a professor at UC Santa Cruz.
Wooster Street is a street in SoHo and Greenwich Village in Manhattan, which runs south to north from Canal Street to Washington Square. It is a prime location for on-location filming and photo shoots due to its relatively low traffic, and the flagstone sidewalks and cobblestone street give it an old gritty feel. It is depicted as a night-time rainy street on the cover of the issue of The New Yorker dated February 8, 2021.
Remi Barclay Messenger was a founding member of three prominent professional theatre companies in the New York City area – the Performance Group (1967–1970), Dionysus in 69 with Richard Schechner, Whole Theatre (1971–1990) and Voices of Earth (1988–2000), the latter two with Olympia Dukakis as a co-director. Her theatre work included years of acting, directing and teaching as well as creating workshops for a wide spectrum of institutions, schools and universities. In 2002, she graduated as a civil celebrant and celebrant trainer in New Jersey, and from 2004 in Australia. She retired in 2016.
