Too Much Memory features most of the original cast, including Laura Heisler (Coram Boy, Stunning, Everything Will Be Different) as Antigone and Peter Jay Fernandez (Pain and the Itch, Thunder Knocking on the Door, Henry IV) as Creon. Martin Moran (Titanic, The Tricky Part, Cabaret) is also part of the mix.
Performances play at Fourth Street Theatre (next door to New York Theatre Workshop), 83 East 4th Street, in Manhattan. The opening is Dec. 9. Gibson directs the piece, which is a project of New York Theatre Workshop's Jonathan Larson Lab.
*
At the FringeNYC, Too Much Memory won the festival's Overall Excellence Award for Outstanding Play and played to sold-out houses.
"A theatrical explosion of myth and revolution, Too Much Memory retells the classic Greek story of Antigone and sets it firmly in the present," according to the producers. "A timeless drama of family conflict and social turmoil, the play is a contemporary collage of mythology and modernity incorporating texts by Richard Nixon, Tom Hayden, Peter Brook, Anne Carson, Pablo Neruda, Susan Sontag, and Hannah Arendt." This is a first-time collaboration between husband and wife — playwright Reddin (Human Error, Black Snow, Life and Limb) and actress-director Gibson (The Ride Down Mt. Morgan at The Public Theater).
The production also features Aria Alpert (Four Women and a Waitress), MacLeod Andrews (Somewhere in the Pacific), Seth Numrich (Iphigenia 2.0), Jamel Rodriguez (Yale MFA 2008), Ray Anthony Thomas (Kindness, Human Error, Half Nelson) and Wendy vanden Heuvel (Not I, Mud, Resurrection Blues).
The creative team includes set designer Ola Maslik, costume designer Clint Ramos, lighting designer Joel Moritz, sound designers Eric Shim and Brandon Epperson, video designer Joe Tekippe and fight director Joseph Travers.
Too Much Memory will play Mondays and Tuesdays at 8:30 PM, Fridays at 9:30 PM, Saturdays at 5 PM and 9:30 PM and Sundays at 5 PM through Dec. 22 at New York Theatre Workshop's Fourth Street Theatre, 83 East 4th Street (between Second Avenue and Bowery). Tickets are $20 and may be purchased by phoning (212) 868-4444 or by visiting www.smarttix.com.
Tickets may only be purchased at the box office 30 minutes prior to the advertised performance time on the day of the performance. Tickets purchased at the box office may only be purchased with cash. For more information about Too Much Memory, visit www.risingphoenixrep.org.
*
The production will expand on the Fringe Festival production and be accompanied by two political forums following the 5 PM performances on Saturday, Dec. 6 and Sunday, Dec. 21, with featured guests to include Amy Goodman (Democracy Now), Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation), Michael Ratner (president, Center for Constitutional Rights), Patricia J. Williams (prominent professor and law critic), JoAnn Wypijewski (columnist – Mother Jones and The Nation), Jared Bernstein (Economic Policy Institute), as well as leading theatre artists including playwright Wallace Shawn.
*
Founded in 1999 by artistic director Daniel Talbott, Rising Phoenix Repertory began by producing an ongoing reading series of new plays and has continued to add workshops, festivals, and highly praised productions of new plays. Recent productions include Don't Pet the Zookeeper at Seventh Street Small Stage, 365 Days/365 Plays at Jimmy's No. 43 and The Public Theater, What Happened When at HERE Arts Center, Fall Forward in the Sitelines/River to River festival produced by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Telling Trilogy (including The Ride, 2006 NYIT Award Nominee – Outstanding Original Short Script), Rules of the Universe (Winner, 2007 NYIT Awards for Outstanding Original Short Script (Daniel Reitz) and Director (Daniel Talbott), and Three Sisters at the Seventh Street Small Stage at Jimmy's No. 43. Too Much Memory was Rising Phoenix Repertory's third production with FringeNYC, following Gift by Mark Schultz in 2005 and Ponies by Mike Batistick in 2003.
