Executive Director, Crystal Field
Presents:
TNC Street Theater Summer Tour – HOME SWEET HOME or A LIFE IN NEW YORK
August 2 – September 14, 2025
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
8/2 • 2pm • Manhattan • TNC at E. 10th St. & First Ave.
8/3 • 2pm • Bronx • St. Mary’s Park at 147th St. & St. Ann’s Ave.
8/9 • 2pm • Staten Island • Tappen Park btw. Canal & Water Streets
8/10 • 2pm • Manhattan • Central Park Bandshell, 72nd Street Crosswalk
8/15 • 5pm • Brooklyn • Coney Island Boardwalk at W. 10st St.
8/16 • 2pm • Manhattan • St. Marks Church at E. 10th St. & Second Ave.
8/17 • 2pm • Manhattan • Jackie Robinson Park at W. 147th St. & Bradhurst Ave.
8/23 • 2pm • Manhattan • Washington Square Park
8/24 • 2pm • Queens • Travers Park at 34th Ave. btw. 77th & 78th Streets
9/6 • 2pm • Brooklyn • Sunset Park at 6th Ave. & 44th St.
9/7 • 2pm • Brooklyn • Fort Greene Park, Myrtle Avenue & St. Edwards Street
9/13 • 2pm • Manhattan • Sol Bloom Playground, W 91st Street btw. Columbus Ave & Central Park West
9/14 • 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 2025 annual tour Saturday, August 2 with “Home Sweet Home, or A Life In New York,” a rip-roaring original musical which tells a story of a young orphan, born in America but longing to understand his roots, as deportations shake the lives of his immigrant friends. 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 14.
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. This year’s play is a story of a young man, an orphan seeking his family roots, at a time when many of his friends are being deported. He was born in America but he knows in his heart that he has a kinship to his fellow young New Yorkers who are suffering greatly and whose sense of security is greatly threatened. He dreams of his desire to become a teacher. In his dream, the Statue of Liberty rises up and embraces him. She reaches out to call out to his friends who hang onto her skirt as the waters of the ocean pull them away.
The owner of the local bodega, where the young man works, is an emigre from Guyana who had proudly obtained his citizenship 20 years ago. Every Sunday morning he plays chess with his friend, the local Firefighter from the Firehouse next door. Together, the two men take the Young Man under their wing and help him find his roots. They sing of fighting fires throughout history (Slavery! Fascism! Atomic War!). Now our beloved Nation suffers immigrant deportation. They summon Lady Liberty and plead for her aid. Lady Liberty appears surrounded by native New Yorkers who support her and guide her new-found children to safety. The musical score includes bold songs like “Pilgrims to the Present” and “We Fight Fire,” culminating in “Together at Last,” a hopeful finale that celebrates unity, diversity, and the dream of a just future.
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 Bodega Owner. 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 paid 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 2022 Street Theater tour, “Teacher! Teacher! or PS I Love You.” 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.
