Duncan Sheik to Score Woodshed Collective's The Tenant

By Adam Hetrick
11 May 2011

Duncan Sheik
Duncan Sheik
Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

The Tenant, the latest work from the New York playwrights collaborative The Woodshed Collective, will premiere this summer with a score by Tony Award-winning Spring Awakening composer Duncan Sheik.

Inspired by Roland Torpor's book of the same title, The Tenant is authored by playwrights Steven Levenson (The Language of Trees), Tommy Smith, Dylan Dawson, Sarah Burgess, Paul Cohen and Bekah Brunstetter (Oohrah!).

Dates of production have not been announced for the work that will be presented free to the public at the West Park parish house on 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. In previous years the Woodshed Collective presented Twelve Ophelias in McCarren Park Pool.

A cast of 20 will bring the work to life, to create what Woodshed describes as a "shifting, mirrored landscape saturated with sound, dance, video and light."

Here's how The Tenant is billed: "A thrilling, haunting and grotesquely hilarious investigation into the relationship between who we are and where we live. When Monsieur Trelkovsky rents a room recently vacated by a woman who fell from her window, he soon finds his world changing in bizarre ways. Haunted by images of the previous Tenant’s apparent suicide and terrorized by his new neighbors, Trelkovsky begins a slow descent into paranoia and delirium."

Sheik, a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, penned the score to the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening, which has book and lyrics by Steven Sater. The musical earned Tonys for Best Score, Best Book and Best Musical. Sheik's projects include The Nightingale (with Sater), as well as the new musical Whisper House (with Kyle Jarrow) and American Psycho (with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa).

The Woodshed Collective is also holding a launch party to benefit the production May 19 at Brooklyn’s The Green Building. It will feature a performance by Gordon Voidwell.

For tickets and further information visit WoodshedCollective.