That’s an inspired touch.”  New York Times

“Love collides with gory revenge in John Ford’s rarely produced tragedy, which is getting a welcome production from Theatre for a New Audience.  In Selina Cartmell’s astonishingly lucid and ravishingly beautiful production, the piece simply rivets audiences’ attention.” Theatermania

“Theatre for a New Audience and director Selina Cartmell deserve accolades not just for reviving Ford’s little-known The Broken Heart, but also for giving it the kind of revelatory production that proves it’s an overlooked classic. The ensemble is uniformly fine, Cartmell is obviously a classical director to watch.” Village Voice

“This stylish rendition of this rarely performed play captures all of its chills and black humor.  The action is clear and swiftly paced, and the large ensemble does well by both the play’s poetic language and its intense physical demands.” New York Post

“There’s a lot to admire in Selina Cartwell’s ghostly production … [with] several truly superb actors.”  New York Magazine

“A sophisticated, insightful, classy production. The timelessness of Ford’s characters’ emotions enables director Selina Cartmell to make the work completely accessible to a modern audience.”  Associated Press

“A peerless production from Theatre for a New Audience. Hallelujah for the ever-inventive director, Selina Cartmell, who has taken a difficult poetic play and made it accessible to all. There’s hardly a false note in this stylish, chic­ presentation that happily also succeeds in conveying a definite emotional punch. A production no serious theatergoer should miss.” Backstage

“The Broken Heart has all the hair-raising pleasures of the genre — grisly blood-lettings, whispered accusations of incest, creeping madness, starvation, and a whiff of necrophilia. This to-the-hilt (sometimes literally) drama is matched by to-the-hilt stagecraft in this magnificent production under Selina Carmell’s direction.” Philadelphia Inquirer

In this artist rendering released by Theatre for a New Audience, a drawing of the Theatre for a New Audience's 299-seat stage planned in the Brooklyn borough of New York, is shown. When opened in 2013, the $48-million theater will be the first new stage designed expressly for Shakespeare and classic drama since 1965 and it will be the first permanent home for the itinerant company. (AP Photo/Theatre for a New Audience)

Associated Press

January 31, 2012
by MARK KENNEDY

NEW YORK (AP) – In a season where little grows in the Northeast, something in Brooklyn is doing just that, foot by foot.

The metal guts of what will be a sleek three-tiered glass box surrounding the Theatre for a New Audience’s 299-seat stage have gone up in a former parking lot as part of the city’s ambitious plan to create a new $650 million cultural district.

“It’s going to be a destination,” said Jeffrey Horowitz, the founding artistic director of the company, during a recent tour of the work site in the Fort Greene section of the borough.

When opened in 2013, the $48-million theater will represent a milestone for Theatre for a New Audience and the city: It will be the first new stage designed expressly for Shakespeare and classic drama since 1965, and it will be the first permanent home for the itinerant company.

“We need a place to gather our activities, to set down roots in a community,” said Horowitz, who founded the theater company in 1979. “Would you go to a doctor or a lawyer whose office kept changing?”

The construction site is one of several at city theaters this winter, including the building of Signature Theatre Company’s new $66 million Frank Gehry-designed home on 42nd Street, a $57 million renovation of New York City Center and a $41 million theater being built on the roof of the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater.

In addition to a 299-seat theater, the 27,500-square-foot Theatre for a New Audience’s home will house a 50-seat rehearsal space and a lobby cafe. It will overlook a new public garden plaza and sit along a walking path between BAM’s Opera House and Harvey Theater.

Continue reading on the AP News website.

Extreme Theater: Wake-Up Calls From the 1600s

By ALEXIS SOLOSKI
January 27, 2012

THE 17th-century playwright John Ford never met a character he didn’t want to kill: gruesomely, ingeniously, poignantly. He liked them stabbed, starved, poisoned, burnt, bled and assaulted by roving packs of bandits. His two best plays — both having forthcoming New York revivals — boast body counts nearly as long as the cast lists.

“The Broken Heart,” which begins performances next Saturday in a Theater for a New Audience production at the Duke on 42nd Street, leaves seven characters dead. “ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” typically offs eight, though fewer perish in the streamlined production from the British troupe Cheek by Jowl that arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on March 20.

Owing perhaps to the violence of his plots, the density of his poetry and the intensity of the emotions he describes, Ford isn’t often staged in New York. For several centuries he wasn’t staged anywhere. Ford began his career as a poet in the early 1600s, then moved to playmaking, working collaboratively with other writers, like Thomas Dekker and John Webster. In the late 1620s Ford struck out on his own, writing eight plays over a decade and then promptly disappearing from the historical record, just as his plays soon disappeared from theaters.

To continue reading on the New York Times website, click here.

Annika Boras in John Ford's “The Broken Heart." Photo: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Above photo, left: Structural steel rising on the rear of the building (facing Rockwell Place). Right: Looking down at the foundation as it is prepared for its acoustic isolation slab.

“So what is it about these violent and baroque plays, four centuries old that haunt our contemporary imagination?  What kind of culture did they spring from?  And why are they once again filling our theatres?
– The Guardian

Intimacy.  Intrigue.  Indecency.   In The Broken Heart a long feud between two Spartan families has ended with the loving engagement of their children, Penthea and Orgilus.  Penthea’s father, however, dies before the wedding can take place, and her twin brother, Ithocles, forces her into a socially advantageous match with a ridiculously jealous older man.  Ithocles returns to Sparta a war hero and falls in love with the Princess Calantha, hoping for precisely the joy he has deprived his sister.  When Origlus takes his revenge, Calantha cannot stand aloof.

Called a “wildly imaginative” director by The Dubliner, Selina Cartmell observes that “The Broken Heart is both ancient and modern. Timeless issues of ‘perverse’ sexual and gender relationships are confronted as Ford interweaves dance, music and silence with his remarkable text.”

The cast of The Broken Heart features Annika Boras, Lady Macbeth in the Theatre’s acclaimed 2011 production of Macbeth, Saxon Palmer (Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice), Bianca Amato (The Coast Of Utopia, Arcadia), and Jacob Fishel, with Justin Blanchard, Olwen Fouéré, Philip Goodwin, Ian Holcomb, John Keating, Robert Langdon Lloyd, Tom Nelis, Margaret Loesser Robinson, and Andrew Weems.

In a strictly limited engagement, The Broken Heart begins previews February 4 and opens February 12, playing through March 4 at The Duke on 42nd Street, a NEW 42ND STREET® project, 229 West 42nd Street.  For tickets and more information, please click here.

In 2007, Selina was chosen as world-renowned director and designer Julie Taymor’s protégé in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, an international philanthropic program that pairs rising young artists with master artists for a year of mentoring. As part of the mentoring process, she observed Taymor direct a new opera, Grendel, written by Elliott Goldenthal.

Recently, in between rehearsals for The Broken Heart, Selina took time to answer a few of our questions about her work.

TFANA: How is The Broken Heart relevant to audiences today?

SC: It’s about the politics of love and having a person taken from you and the loss that follows. The play contrasts the gloss of surface society and the poison that infects society from within. The play is about repressed emotions. Ford is fearless in his writing and in the creations of his worlds. He challenges institutions and forces us to look at the outsiders in society. The fact that there are two John Ford productions being done in New York back to back [Cartmell’s The Broken Heart and Cheek By Jowl's 'Tis Pity She’s a Whore at BAM in March] speaks to the relevance and importance of doing his work now.

TFANA: How does your work as protégée to Julie Taymor inform your work today?

SC: I admire the fact that Julie straddles Opera, film and theater and this is something I am exploring. After I observed Julie working on Grendel, I developed a new opera in Dublin. Julie told me not to limit myself, because it is possible to merge different art forms freely. We are both interested in mythic stories and ritual on stage.

TFANA: How does the mission of Theatre for a New Audience align with your own ideas about theatre?

SC: I’m very interested in directing both Shakespeare and other classic texts, in both their original forms and in modern adaptations.

TFANA: What is next for you?

SC: This year I’ll be directing King Lear at the Abbey. I’m looking forward to working with the same actor who played Titus in my production of Titus Andronicus.

Selina Cartmell is currently artist-in-residence at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin, a scholarship granted by the Arts Council of Ireland. With this residency, she has embarked on new projects including a new version of Euripides’ Medea, the world premiere of a translation by Scottish poet Robin Robertson (winner of the Best Director Award and nominated for 5 Irish Times Theatre Awards). As well, she has explored the work of John Ford, conducting workshops and readings of his plays ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and The Broken Heart, which informed her current production at TFANA. She also served as mentor to a young Irish director, Rosemary McKenna.

Selina is the founder and Artistic Director of Siren Productions in Dublin. Her productions include Macbeth,Titus Andronicus (winner of 4 Irish Times Theatre Awards including Best Production and Best Director); La Musica (Best Production and Best Actress; Dublin Fringe Festival); Fando & Lis and Shutter (Project Arts Centre). Other productions Molly Sweeney (Curve, Leicester), The Cordelia Dream (Royal Shakespeare Company) and The Giant Blue Hand (The Ark), Only An Apple, Big Love and Woman and Scarecrow (Abbey Theatre), Sweeney Todd (Gate Theatre, Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Opera Production), Festen and Catastrophe (Barbican Theatre, London).

Selina trained as a director at Central School of Speech & Drama, London and holds a First Class MA in History of Art and Drama from Trinity College, Dublin and Glasgow University.

For more information on this production, and to order tickets, please click here.

Theatre for a New Audience is proud to partner with MACS, serving the school’s 9th and 10th grade students with 13-week residencies in both playwriting and Shakespeare. Our playwriting program, the New Voices Project, provides students with the tools to create written work in the dramatic medium for the empowerment of their own voices. Students in our Shakespeare program, the World Theatre Project, will see the Theatre’s off-Broadway production of The Taming of the Shrew and participate in hands-on lessons exploring the play and Shakespeare’s language. Both programs will culminate with performances at the school in early June.

For more information on the Theatre’s education programs, please click here.

Two more weeks for Fiasco Theater’s Widely-Acclaimed Production of Cymbeline Now Thru January 15 at Barrow Street Theatre

For Immediate Release Please

NEW YORK, Dec. 19 – CYMBELINE IS EXTENDING! FIASCO THEATER’S PRODUCTION OF CYMBELINE WILL CONTINUE ITS SMASHING ENGAGEMENT AT THE BARROW STREET THEATRE FOR ANOTHER TWO WEEKS THROUGH JANUARY 15.

Cymbeline, a critics’ pick just about everywhere, had been scheduled to close January 1, but surging ticket demand and a little juggling of schedules, has given the show another two weeks to entertain audiences of all ages.

Fiasco Theater’s production of Cymbeline, co-directed by Fiasco Theater’s Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld, is presented by Theatre for a New Audience, Jeffrey Horowitz, Artistic Director, Scott Morfee, Jean Doumanian and Tom Wirtshafter. Cymbeline‘s 14 roles are performed by the original company: Jessie Austrian, Paul L. Coffey, Andy Grotelueschen, Emily Young and Messrs. Brody and Steinfeld.

Critic’s pick! “THE MOST TRULY ENCHANTING CYMBELINE I’VE SEEN. EXQUISITE.” -Ben Brantley, New York Times

“The Fiasco Company brings joyful music, playful inventiveness and just an air-kiss of irony to Shakespeare’s mock-epic. They remind us what theater, at its simplest and most powerful, is really for: the alchemical thrill of watching an entire work conjured into being out of sheer wit and will. A small masterpiece.” -Scott Brown, New York Magazine

“A playful and inspired work of art.” – The New Yorker

Click here to check out Cymbeline on WNBC TV

Holiday Performance Schedule
——————————————————————————–

Christmas Week Schedule

Thursday, December 22, at 2:30pm & 7:30pm
Friday, December 23, at 7:30pm
NO PERFORMANCE CHRISTMAS EVE
Sunday, December 25, at 2:30pm & 7:30pm
——————————————————————————–

New Year’s Week Schedule

Monday, December 26, at 7:30pm
Tuesday, December 27, at 7:30pm
Wednesday, December 28, at 2:30pm & 7:30pm
Thursday, December 29, at 7:30pm
Friday, December 30, at 2:30pm & 7:30pm
NO PERFORMANCE NEW YEAR’S EVE
Sunday, January 1, at 2:30pm & 7:30pm
——————————————————————————–
Beginning January 3, Cymbeline returns to its regular performance schedule: Tuesday through Friday at 7:30pm, Saturday and Sunday at 2:30pm & 7:30pm through January 15.
——————————————————————————–
Box Office

Regular tickets are $75.00 and may be purchased by phone at 212-868-4444; online at www.smarttix.com or in person at the Barrow Street Theatre box office, 27 Barrow Street (on the corner of Seventh Avenue, one block south of Christopher Street). The box office opens at 1:00pm daily.

Student tickets at $20 are available on the day of performance only at the box office, cash only, based on availability. For group sales, email boxoffice@barrowstreettheatre.com.

The Family Planning Package is simplicity itself: $49.50 for each adult, $25 for each child 25 and under. The package requires a minimum purchase of three tickets which must include one adult. Tickets may be purchased via 646-873-8216 or in person at the Barrow Street Theatre box office.