NewsGleason, Wood, Day, Dizzia and More Set for Sundance Theatre Lab Acting CompanyTony Award winners Joanna Gleason, Frank Wood and Tony nominee Johanna Day will lead the acting company for the Sundance Institute's MASS MoCA Theatre Lab.
By
Adam Hetrick
March 26, 2010
Joanna Gleason
Running March 28-April 11 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA, the lab temporarily replaces the annual July lab in Utah while the Sundance Resort undergoes upgrades. New York City's Governor's Island will also play host to a Sundance Lab in May.
In addition to Gleason (Into the Woods, Happiness, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), Wood (Side Man, August: Osage County, Spring Awakening) and Day (Proof, August: Osage County), the company will feature Maria Dizzia (In the Next Room.., Eurydice), Molly Camp, Matthew Dellapina (I Am Nobody's Lunch), MacKenzie Meehan, Alfredo Narciso (A Streetcar Named Desire, Drunken City), Owiso Odera and Gregory Wooddell (Some Men).
Sundance Institute Theatre Program artistic director Philip Himberg will oversee the retreat, which provides artists a breeding ground to develop new work. Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman ('Night Mother, The Secret Garden) will serve as a creative advisor. Janice Paran and Shirley Fishman will be dramaturgs.
The works include:
A Small Fire by Adam Bock, directed by Trip Cullman. "A Small Fire asks us: When life hands you a big change, how do you respond? Do you try to return to the way things were, or do you take a chance and change even more? People love and hate change, because it demands that we be clear about who we are, and who we want to be."
Bwagamoyo by Shailja Patel, directed by Liesl Tommy. "Bwagamoyo charts a voyage from colonial Zanzibar to Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence, by way of the male body. Drawing on the history of the artist's father, born and raised in Zanzibar, and Patel's personal involvement with Kenya’s post-election crisis, Bwagamoyo shows how the architecture of Empire is codified on the bodies of men. How the stories of our bodies are intimately mirrored in the larger Body Politic, and our national histories. Bwagamoyo is the second work in Patel's four-part opus, Migritude."
Out of Orbit by Jennifer Maisel, directed by Jackson Gay. "A mother and her teenage daughter. The Jet Propulsion Lab Scientist and the underachiever. Sara lives on Mars time, spearheading the Mars Rover Expedition, visiting a planet she cannot touch, while her daughter, Lis, on earth time, falls under the spell of the cyber-cypher Edgar2330. Sometimes it takes being worlds apart for an exploring woman and a longing-to-be-explored girl to find each other in our increasingly disconnected universe." As previously reported, performance artist John Kelly (known for his acclaimed tributes to Joni Mitchell) will develop The Escape Artist, "a collision of music, video and story. In a studio dubbing recording session for cinematic re-enactments of the paintings of Caravaggio, a singer hired to lay down the tracks channels the characters that populate the paintings, encounters unexpected technical difficulties, and reveals a turbulent personal history of his own."
The production will include Bernstein’s incidental music for Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of The Lark, and Menotti’s The Unicorn, The Gorgon, and The Manticore.
Based on the novel and film by Frank Cottrell Boyce, the new musical will reunite Guettel with Tony-winning Light in the Piazza director Bartlett Sher.
