THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY Executive Artistic Director, Crystal Field
Presents
A Part Of The Noise
A new play written by Carl Kline
Directed by Joe John Battista
October 8, 2026 – October 25, 2026
Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8:00 PM, Sunday at 3:00 PM
Tickets – $20, Students & Seniors $15
Run time: 2 hours with intermission
JOHNSON THEATER
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003 Directions
The year is 1959, and Franz’ art dealer, Sidney Janis, refuses to include Franz’ new color abstractions in an upcoming one-man show. Sidney wants Franz to ride out the popularity of his black and white paintings that are selling for record prices. Franz insists on including his two newest color abstractions, and Sidney threatens that if he does, this will be his last show at the prestigious Janis Gallery.
Later, at the legendary Cedar Tavern, watering hole for famous and infamous downtown artists, writers, and musicians, including Joan Mitchell, and David Amram, Franz’ interview with young writer/art critic Artie Mendelbaum starts a roller coaster ride filled with stories, surprises, intense personal history, a post-viewing party of the movie “Pull My Daisy,” integrity, physical interactions, and a cavalcade of emotions ranging from grief to laughter.
With a little help from his friends, Franz’ show at Sidney’s gallery presents a twist involving his biggest collector, a couple of disguises, and Sidney. The scene also hints at Franz’ declining health.
This play is homage to Franz, the artists, writers, and musicians of the era. Although it can be seen on its face as a play about art vs. commerce, it’s more about confrontation: Confrontation between artists and those who critique it, and the confrontation with the audience to witness and accept the courage of everyone who dedicates their lives to their creativity and never, ever give up.
CAST
Ryan Tramont*
Zoe Anastassiou*
Alexandra Laliberte
Skye Themeda Goss
Tony Del Bono
Mike Meth*
Alex Elmaleh*
Michael John Gross
*Actors Appearing Courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association without the benefit of an equity contract in this Off-Off Broadway Production.
PRODUCTION
Production Stage Manager – Abby Fry
Stage Manager – Sayma Karim
Assistant Stage Manager – Olivia Talian
Lighting Design – Alexander Bartenief
Set Design – Mark Marcante and Lytza Colón
Set Painter Lola Sáenz
Lighting Board – Elijah Smith
Public Relations – Roger Gonzalez
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY Executive Artistic Director, Crystal Field
Presents
Obit
September 17, 2026 – October 4, 2026
Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8:00 PM, Sunday at 3:00 PM
Tickets – $20, Students & Seniors $15
Run time: 90 minutes, no intermission
CINO THEATER
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003 Directions
In this post-apocalyptic female revenge thriller, Maya Hawthorne, an “advance” obituary writer for the New York Times, arrives at aging college president Philip Stern’s house to interview him for his obituary. President Stern is hoping this interview will yield him a great obituary in the Times. Maya Hawthorne wants answers from the man who ruined her life years earlier.
“Obit” was developed through the NYU/Tisch Graduate Acting Alumni Association Writers Group and had a staged reading at the Studio Tisch Festival, NYU/Tisch Grad Acting in 2023. It was a runner-up in the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival Playwriting Contest in 2025.
Rebecca Chace writes, “I am so grateful for Crystal Field’s longtime support of my work. My first play, ‘Colette,’ was produced by Theater for the New City back in the 1990s. Having the opportunity to premiere ‘Obit’ at TNC feels like coming home. In an era when nonprofit theaters are hard hit by funding cuts and curtailing their commitment to new work, Crystal Field and Theater for the New City remain a beacon on the horizon in the New York theater scene.”
CAST
Richard Topol
Carolyn Holding
PRODUCTION
Production Stage Manager – Abby Fry
Lighting Design – Dante Olivia Smith
Set and Costume Design – Anna Grigo
Sound Designer – Brian Hickey
Consulting Producer – Amy Fritz
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th & 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003 Directions
The Unforgiving Apology
After 7 years of being incarcerated, a former All-American returns home to reconnect with the woman responsible for wrongfully accusing him. While guilt and anger fuel their conversation, they struggle to confront their inner demons to say words neither wants to, and find closure he needs from his traumatic past.
Cast
TBA
BIO
CHIMA CHIKAZUNGA FSU alumni. His audio play “An Icons Belief in Fallen Soldiers” was commissioned by The Classical Theatre of Harlem. “Echoes of a Lost Son” won the 2019 Public Access Television Award and featured in Resilience New Play Festival. Published work in Best Women’s and Men’s Monologues 2022, and Best American Short Plays 2018-2019, and Best Women’s Monologues 2025. His plays NOT JUST YOU and 1 Letter Shy of Coincidence, both received a micro-grants from National Black Theatre to workshop. 1 Letter Shy of Coincidence ( SEMI-FINALIST 46th Annual BAPF,) SAFEHOUSE: Axial Playwright Series. FOLDING DANICA is featured in American Blues Theatre’s Ripped Festival. Assassination of a Dream Deferred- (Semifinalist ) 3rd Annual Black Motherhood & Parenting New Play Festival. Other plays presented in NYC by AND Theatre Company, TFNC, DUAF, and The Players Theatre. Most recently NOT JUST YOU received a developmental reading at United Palace Theatre, featuring Dan Lauria.
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY Executive Artistic Director, Crystal Field
Presents
TILTED AXES: NECESSARY MUSIC ONLY
Movements for Electric Guitars
September 17, 2026 – October 4, 2026
Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8:00 PM, Sunday at 3:00 PM
Tickets – $20, Students & Seniors $15
Run time: 75 minutes
JOHNSON THEATER
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003 Directions
Theater for the New City presents the return of Tilted Axes with Necessary Music Only, an original work of music theater created by composer Patrick Grant that combines mobile electric guitars, live percussion, choreography, lighting, and visual media into a singular theatrical experience.
Returning to Theater for the New City following last season’s production, Tilted Axes: Necessary Music Only transforms the stage into a constantly evolving landscape of sound and movement. Musicians perform while walking through choreographed formations, creating shifting musical textures that blur the boundaries between concert, dance, and theater.
Produced by: Peppergreen Media
Music by: Patrick Grant and Tilted Axes: Music for Mobile Electric Guitars composers
Choreography & Lighting by: Christopher Caines
Performed by: Gene Ardor, Lori Bingel, John Ferrari, Grace Goss, Patrick Grant, John Halo, Igor Icaza, James Lee, Jeremy Nesse, James Schoen, and Dmitri Shapira
Photo & video credits: Jocelyn Gonzales and Jack Wang
Created by composer and artistic director Patrick Grant, Tilted Axes: Music for Mobile Electric Guitars is an ensemble of electric guitarists and percussionists that transforms streets, parks, galleries, museums, and theaters into immersive musical environments. Performing untethered with battery-powered amplifiers, the musicians invite audiences into an experience where music is living, physical, and shared. Moving continuously through the performance space, they create an environment that is at once ritual, procession, and music theater.
Now in its sixteenth season, Tilted Axes continues to bring contemporary music into public life through movement, community, and shared experience.
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th & 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003 Directions
A DREAM BEYOND THIS PAIN
A drama of three generations of a middle-class family living the American Dream on Long Island taking care of life’s pains with prescribed medications and recreational substances. When the grandson’s dream falls apart as a result of opioid addiction and the grandfather has to leave his home because he’s mixing up his medications, and the father refuses to take his prescribed SSRI, each generation’s aspirations for the family come unraveled. They must find a way to rediscover a shared dream that will sustain them as a family and as individuals living in a new American Reality.
Cast
TBA
Bios:
JONATHON WARD (producing playwright) is a New Yorker who creates theatre for the delightful hell of it. He’s had the pleasure to create, publish and develop new theatre in USA and Canada in FringeNYC, ATHE New Play Development Workshop 2022, New Circle Theatre Company, Chelsea Rep/The Acting Studio, Eventide Theatre (winning the Kaplan Playwriting Competition, 2022), Indie Theater Now, Secret Theatre, Theatre Conspiracy, Birdhouse Theatre, Manhattan Repertory, Itinerant Theatre, Plays and Pizza, Little Funky Theatre, William Inge Festival (twice), Metropolitan Playhouse (three times), Barter Theater, InspiraTO, Abrons Arts Center, Applause Books (Best One-Act Plays 2014-15), Huntington Arts Council, Cooperstown Art Museum, Little Victory Players, Pulse Ensemble, Community Free Theatre, NYU Studio Tisch, Urban Youth Theatre, University of Chicago and others. He has received five NYSCA commissions, as well as grants from New York University, and private foundations. During his thirty years as an arts administrator, he was the Director of the Theater Program at the Henry Street Settlement Abrons Arts Center and Department Administrator of the NYU Graduate Acting Program. He has written and had produced over 20 plays and produced and presented over 200 shows of other artists. Some of his plays can be found on the New Play Exchange at: https://newplayexchange.org/users/10146/jonathon-ward
LORI KEE (director) is an award-winning director & experienced collaborator on new work. Recent:Japanese Porno by John Patrick Shanley. Upcoming: Zeph and Violet by Krystle N. Adams (Oct 27), 5 One Acts by John Patrick Shanley at the Actors Studio (Nov). She directed the premiere of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright John Patrick Shanley’s play Candlelight. Projects: The Listening Room/with I. Dumeng (Michela Jeffrey), The Chaplin Plays (Don Nigro), Luft Gangster (off Bway, Assoc Dir w/Austin Pendleton), The Big Funk (John Patrick Shanley), Paper Dragon (Alisha Silver), over 60 one acts & other new work including by: John Patrick Shanley (The Lost Years, Brooklyn Laundry, Tennessee, French Waitress, & Japanese Porno), Lyle Kessler, Craig muMs Grant, Webb Wilcoxen, Kristina Poe, Florencia Lozano, Maggie Diaz Bofill, Melissa Skirboll, James McLindon, Arlene Hutton.
Associate SDC, Actors Studio PDU. Resident Director/Member of Nylon Fusion for over a decade. She is an Associate Professor of Theatre at CUNY BMCC. www.lorikee.com@thelorikee
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th & 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003 Directions
Pleasant Dreams
30 years ago: The director of a Jewish Festival in Berlin uses my café (The Cornelia Street Café in the West Village) to scout talent for his Eleventh Annual Jewish Days of Culture; he buys a copy of my book (Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski . . . ) and invites me to come to Berlin to perform and give a lecture; on the way I stop in Amsterdam with my sister from London to unveil a stone at the grave of our uncle Georg, philanthropist, refugee advocate, Auschwitz survivor. In Berlin we discover the graves of our grandparents, whom we had never known: both our parents had managed to escape; both our grandfathers had died before Hitler; both our grandmothers had lived to die in concentration camps. On my last night I perform in the ruins of the synagogue at which my parents worshiped, in front of a backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge, and invite the audience to follow me over the bridge for a nightcap at the Cornelia Street Café.
Bio (Robin Hirsch, writer/performer):
Robin Hirsch was born in London during the Blitz to German Jews who had escaped Hitler. This complex inheritance informs much of his work both as a writer (LAST DANCE AT THE HOTEL KEMPINSKI–“one of the best books ever written on the long arm of the Holocaust” according to Jewish Book News, and perhaps the only Holocaust-related memoir to have been called “very funny” by the New York Times) and as a performer (MOSAIC: FRAGMENTS OF A JEWISH LIFE, a seven-part solo performance cycle, called “completely glorious” by the Village Voice, with which he has toured all over the US and several times in Europe).
He is a former Oxford, Fulbright, and English Speaking Union Scholar, a two-time NYFA Fellow and the recipient of numerous other awards, but the titles of which he is proudest were self-bestowed: Minister of Culture/Wine Czar/Dean of Faculty at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, which he started with two other artists as one room with a toaster-oven, but which grew over its 41-year existence to include three rooms upstairs, two bars, two kitchens, and a performance space downstairs in which he curated some 700 shows a year in every conceivable genre (and quite a few inconceivable ones). In 1987, on her tenth anniversary, Mayor Koch of blessed memory proclaimed Cornelia “a culinary as well as a cultural landmark.”
Every word of both KEMPINSKI and MOSAIC was written to be first uttered chez Cornelia. Robin currently has a book of café stories, THE WHOLE WORLD PASSES THROUGH: STORIES FROM THE CORNELIA STREET CAFÉ, scheduled to be published (in England!). PLEASANT DREAMS was originally written for that collection. This is the first time that it will be performed in its entirety.
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY SETS ITS 14th DREAM UP FESTIVAL
23 Productions, 18 World Premieres
All events at THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003 Directions
August 23 to September 13, 2026
ABOUT DREAM UP – TNC’s Summer Showcase
The motto of the festival is “Dream Up: Invent, Concoct.” The festival is dedicated to new works. The question of the artist’s vision to free or attack the material will be asked in each application. The festival does not want traditional theater which is presented in a traditional way. Theater for the New City wants to use this festival as a way to push ideas to the forefront with the hope of revealing roads less traveled or undiscovered. Presentation of a straightforward play must be imaginative in some way.
TNC Street Theater Summer Tour – THE ROOT OF IT ALL, A DENTIST’S TALE
August 1 – September 13, 2026
Free! In The Streets!
Saturdays and Sundays @ 2 PM; Friday Performance in Coney Island @ 5:00 PM (full schedule below)
Writer and Director – Crystal Field Composer – Peter Dizozza
8/1 • 2pm • Manhattan • TNC at E. 10th St. & First Ave.
8/2 • 2pm • Bronx • St. Mary’s Park at 147th St. & St. Ann’s Ave.
8/8 • 2pm • Staten Island • Tappen Park btw. Canal & Water Streets
8/9 • 2pm • Manhattan • Central Park Bandshell, 72nd Street Crosswalk
8/14 • 5pm • Brooklyn • Coney Island Boardwalk at W. 10st St.
8/15 • 2pm • Manhattan • St. Marks Church at E. 10th St. & Second Ave.
8/16 • 2pm • Manhattan • Jackie Robinson Park at W. 147th St. & Bradhurst Ave.
8/22 • 2pm • Manhattan • Washington Square Park
8/23 • 2pm • Queens • Travers Park at 34th Ave. btw. 77th & 78th Streets
8/29 • 2pm • Brooklyn • Sunset Park at 6th Ave. & 44th St.
8/30 • 2pm • Brooklyn • Fort Greene Park, Myrtle Avenue & St. Edwards Street
9/12 • 2pm • Manhattan • Sol Bloom Playground, W 91st Street btw. Columbus Ave & Central Park West
9/13 • 2pm • Manhattan • Tompkins Square Park at E. 7th St. & Ave. A
NEW YORK – Theater for the New City’s award-winning Street Theater Company will open its 2026 annual tour Saturday, August 1 with “The Root of it all: A Dentist’s Tale,” a comic musical in which a neighborhood dentist and a brigade of unlikely heroes battle cavities of fear, hatred, and injustice after an ICE raid. Book, lyrics and direction are by Crystal Field, Artistic Director of Theater for the New City (TNC). The musical score is composed and arranged by Peter Dizozza. Free performances will tour parks, playgrounds and closed-off streets throughout the five boroughs through September 13.
TNC’s Street Theater has impacted generations of audiences, encouraging the younger generation to make a difference in their own neighborhoods. Productions have celebrated the diversity of our heritage, the strength of our citizens, and the optimistic hope for a successful road to their future. In this year’s play, a neighborhood dentist operates a free weekend clinic that serves children from immigrant families. When several young patients suddenly stop coming for their checkups, he fears something is terribly wrong. His suspicions are confirmed when an ICE agent storms into the clinic to seize a child in the middle of an appointment. Mistaking the dentist’s dental drill for a weapon, the agent shouts, “Drop the gun!” The bewildered dentist protests, “The gum! The gum!” before being knocked unconscious.
A neighborhood dentist and a chorus of very “patient” patients battle the moral decay threatening America’s ideals in Theater for the New City’s 2026 Street Theater production, “The Root of It All, A Dentist’s Tale,” written and directed by Crystal Field with score composed by Peter Dizozza. With ICE agents emerging from giant cavities as symbols of fear and division, the dentist envisions a quest to “root out” hatred instead of people. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.
In a fantastical dream, the dentist enters a surreal world where dancing teeth, an activist Tooth Fairy, and a chorus of very “patient” patients battle the moral decay threatening America’s ideals. With ICE agents emerging from giant cavities as symbols of fear and division, the dentist envisions a quest to “root out” hatred instead of people. A brigade of unlikely heroes invokes the nation’s immigrant heritage–from its earliest settlers to generations of newcomers–celebrating America’s diversity, compassion, and shared humanity. The historic wisdom of the United States promises a future in which the cavities of war are filled with hope and the promise of cooperation and peace. The community awakens from its nightmare inspired and unites to protect its neighbors and secure the child’s release, reminding us that healing a nation, like caring for a smile, begins by getting to the root of it all.
The production will be staged with an elaborate assemblage of trap doors, giant puppets, smoke machines, masks, original choreography and a huge (9′ x 12′) running screen or “cranky” providing continuous moving scenery behind the actors. The company of 22 actors, ten crew members, two stage managers, three assistant directors and five live musicians (led by the composer at the keyboard) will share the challenge of performing outside and holding a large, non-captive audience. The music will vary in style from Bossa Nova to Hip Hop to Musical Comedy to classical Cantata. The play is a bouncy joyride through the undulations of the body politic, with astute commentary couched in satire, song and slapstick.
TNC’s free Street Theater productions are delightfully suited for family audiences, since complex social issues are often presented through children’s allegories, with children and neighborhood people as the heroes.
Michael David Gordon heads the cast of 22 as the Dentist. The five-piece band is led by composer Peter Dizozza.
Theater for the New City has mounted a new musical for a five borough tour each year since 1976. In 2020, in response to the Covid-19 lockdown, TNC’s Street Theater production, “Liberty or Just Us: a City Park Story,” was an oratorio that live streamed for an eight week, 14 performance run. Each performance payed tribute to the park or other location it had been originally scheduled for. The popular tradition returned to live, in-person performances the following year.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Author/director Crystal Field began writing street theater in 1968 as a member of Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She wrote and performed her own outdoor theater pieces against the Vietnam War and also curated and performed many poetry programs for the Philadelphia Public Schools. There she found tremendous enthusiasm and comprehension on the part of poor and minority students for both modern and classical poetry when presented in a context of relevancy to current issues. She realized that for poetry to find its true audience, the bonds of authoritarian criticism must and can be transcended. Her earliest New York street productions were playlets written in Philadelphia and performed on the flatbed truck of Bread and Puppet Theater in Central Park. Peter Schumann, director of that troupe, was her first NY artistic supporter.
In 1971, Ms. Field became a protégé of Robert Nichols, founder of the Judson Poets Theater in Manhattan, and of Peter Schuman, founder of Bread and Puppet Theater. It is an interesting historic note that “The Expressway” by Robert Nichols, directed by Crystal Field (a Street theater satire about Robert Moses’ plan for a throughway to run across Little Italy from the West Side Highway to the FDR Drive) was actually the first production of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. Nichols wrote street theater plays for TNC in its early years, but as time went on, wrote scenarios and only the first lines of songs, leaving Field to “fill in the blanks.” When Nichols announced his retirement to Vermont in 1975, he urged Field to “write your own.” The undertaking, while stressful at first, became the impetus for her to express her own topical political philosophy and to immerse her plays in that special brand of humor referred to often as “that brainy slapstick.” Her first complete work was “Mama Liberty’s Bicentennial Party” (1976), in honor of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution.
Field has an associate’s degree in Dance from Juilliard and a BA in Philosophy from Hunter College.
Field has written and directed a completely new opera for the TNC Street Theater company each successive year. She collaborated for eleven years with composer Mark Hardwick, whose “Pump Boys and Dinettes” and “Oil City Symphony” were inspired by his street theater work with Ms. Field. At the time of his death from AIDS in 1994, he was writing a clown musical with Field called “On the Road,” which was never finished. One long-running actor in TNC street theater was Tim Robbins, who was a member of the company for six years in the 1980s, from age twelve to 18.
The Village Halloween Parade, which TNC produced single-handedly for the Parade’s first two years, grew out of the procession which preceded each Street Theater production. Ralph Lee, who created the Parade with Ms. Field, was chief designer for TNC’s Street Theater for four years before the Village Halloween Parade began.
Field has also written for TNC’s annual Halloween Ball and for an annual Yuletime pageant that was performed outdoors for 2,000 children on the Saturday before Christmas. She has written two full-length indoor plays, “Upstate” and “One Director Against His Cast.” She is co-founder and Artistic Director of TNC.
Composer Peter Dizozza was composer/musical director of TNC’s Street Theater tours “Teacher! Teacher! or PS I Love You” (2022), “The Socialization of a Social Worker or The Fight for Social Justice” (2024) and “Home Sweet Home, or a Life In New York” (2025). He appeared frequently in 2020-2021 in TNC’s weekly “Open ‘Tho Shut” walk-by theater productions, which demonstrated the theater’s ability to serve its neighborhood culturally during the lockdown. He is known for his simple, cheerful music with a Gershwinesque flair. He began writing plays with music for La Mama’s Experimenta Series in 1997 and became a regular composer for productions directed by George Ferencz. Among his TNC credits are his scores for Toby Armour’s plays “Aunt Susan and Her Tennessee Waltz” (2022) and “155 Thru the Roof” (2014). His song settings include poems and texts by Shakespeare, T.S.Eliot and Thomas Hardy. He is a member of the Dramatist Guild, The Lambs Club and The New York Composers Circle.
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY Executive Artistic Director, Crystal Field
Presents
A Rome Neal Banana Puddin’ Jazz Production
Celebrating 23 years
Banana Puddin’ Jazz!
Monday, June 29, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Tickets: $20 General Admission
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003 Directions
Special Treat:
Complimentary Banana Puddin’ for all attendees 🍌
Featured Musicians:
Andre Chez Lewis, (2026 Grammy Award-winning pianist/Music director and pianist for the legendary Dionne Warwick/Protégé of the renowned pianist, the late Dr. Barry Harris), Kim Clarke (bass), Dwayne Cook Broadnax (drums), Patience Higgins (sax)
Special Guest Performers:
TC THE 3RD, Antoinette Montague, Dr. Eric Frazier, Theresa Phillips, Kat Rei, Kay Lewis, Brian Davis, Steve Cromity, and Angelo and Aero Lewis
Sponsors:
John D. Smith, Stephen Mckinley Henderson, Jazz Foundation Of America, Tracy Appleton, Dr. Mona Vaughn Scott, Sean V. Scott, Basir Mchawi, Sheryl Renee Productions, Malaika M.Scott MD, Dr. Brenda Greene, Black Repertory Group Berkeley, Commbs Brooklyn Printing, Black Theatre Project (Documentary)
Rome Neal’s Banana Puddin’ Jazz is a long-running, award-winning, critically acclaimed New York City performance series that blends live jazz, community spirit, and audience interaction with the rich legacy of Black theater. Founded in 2003, each event features top-tier musicians and vocalists, an open mic session, a collaborative audience poem, and a serving of Rome Neal’s famous, complimentary homemade banana pudding.
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th & 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003 Directions
THEATER
Songs of Love and Madness is a postmodern romantic comedy that consists of a duet, a love triangle, and a quartet, in which the romantic tropes popularized by contemporary love songs collide with delusions listed in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Illnesses): Is love truly a madness to be desired. All three of the scenes/songs have been produced separately in play festivals, two receiving awards at those festivals.
CAST
Song #1: Could Forever Have Only Ever Meant
Husband: Noah Yager
Wife: Kaley Bender
Song #2: Just Like You
Patient: Isabel Lagana
Therapist: Dan Mauro
Fregoli: Noah Yager
Song #3: Blind For You
Prof. Aurora: Isabel Lagana
Man: Dan Mauro
Woman/Alice: Kaley Bender
About the Crew Mark Tjarks (Author/Composer) teaches scriptwriting, film, and literature at Hawaii Pacific University. His Buskers, the Musical, based on the real lives and performance of New York subway musicians) was presented by the Theater for the New City as part of a pre-COVID New Blood Reading series and Dream Up! Festival. He has had 5 plays staged in Manhattan, including The Unsalable Thing (winner of First Place in the William Faulkner Literary Competition Best Play Contest) and Houseless in Paradise (Po’okela Award winner for Best Overall Play and a Festival Best Bet at the NY International Fringe Fest—“one of the most powerful pieces of documentary theatre I’ve seen” – Ran Xia’s Theatre is Easy). Tjarks is also a recipient of three WIT Best Comedy Awards, Aloha Theatre’s Opie for Best Play, PlayBuilders’ judges and audience awards for Best Play, and Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Playwriting Resident Award. Overall, he has had 32 productions and staged readings of 15 plays.
Nick Hrutkay (Director) is an award-winning director based in Pittsburgh. He has spent ten seasons on the artistic staff at Stagedoor Manor where he is the Director of Education and Assistant Artistic Director. His work has been seen across the country at Theatre Row, The Kennedy Center, The Brick, Actors Temple Theatre, Axelrod Performing Arts Center, Bell Theater, Hippodrome Theatre, Central Square Theater, The Media Theatre, Cumberland Theatre, The Huron Playhouse, Pittsburgh Shakespeare in the Parks, Alchemical Studios, Playwrights Local, Keystone Repertory Theater, Stagedoor Manor, Carnegie Mellon University, and Point Park University. Nick is the recipient of an ArtWorks Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Region II / Stage Directors and Choreographers Society Fellowship, and a BroadwayWorld Award for Best Director of a Musical. nickhrutkay.com
Cecilia Bracey (Assistant Director) is a director based in NYC. She strives to facilitate stories that are, at their core, honest portrayals of the human experience. Recent NYC Directing Credits Include: UNCOMMON WOMEN AND OTHERS, -IN-CHIEF, DRY LAND, SORRY! WE’RE CLOSED! THE SQUIRREL WATCHERS, OUT/Play Regional: SIX by Timothy Mason, and WHAT I WANT TO SAY BUT NEVER WILL. She’s worked at Law and Order: SVU, as Broadway at Music Circus, Powerhouse Theater, and Roundabout Theatre Company and currently is the a producer for OUT/PLAY. Bachelor of Music from CUA. @cecilia_bracey
