22/23 Season

Fuente Ovejuna

By Lope de Vega, translated by Adrian Mitchell
This Production is the New York Premiere of Adrian Mitchell’s Translation
Directed by Flordelino Lagundino
April 30 – May 28, 2023

The great Spanish author Lope de Vega (1562–1635) wrote FUENTE OVEJUNA in 1612 after he was inspired by a historical incident: farmers and peasants of the village of Fuente Ovejuna rose up against a military commander and his soldiers who routinely brutalized and oppressed them. In Lope de Vega’s play, after she has been raped by a tyrannical commander and his men, Laurencia, daughter of the Mayor, demands her father and the village leaders face that they didn’t stop the crime.

 

“To this all-wise, all-male Council meeting:
You may not allow a woman to vote
But you can’t stop her yelling…”

 

Her confrontation inspires the entire town to revolt. The Commander is slaughtered, but no one even when tortured will say who is the killer. Each will only admit that everyone is responsible.

FUENTE OVEJUNA is about feminism, class, collective resistance, democracy, and human rights, but it was written long before the Declaration of Independence; French Revolution; the 19th Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote; and, of course, today’s #MeToo movement.   

Lope de Vega’s words have rung out for centuries. His genius was to create a powerful mix of music, singing, dance, humor, and unforgettable drama. TFANA’s production directed by Flordelino Lagundino is the play’s Off-Broadway Premiere in English. Adrian Mitchell’s translation had its world premiere in 1989 at London’s National Theatre where it was acclaimed: “A stirring hymn to the passion of fellowship. ‘What’s got into them?’ asks the lord of his prisoner – ‘Love,’ replies the latter.”–City Limits (London)

CAST

Barzin Akhavan, Carlo Albán, Jack Berenholtz, Stephen Berenson, Jo Brook, Jonathan Cake, Ben Chase, Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Kenneth De Abrew, José Espinosa, Paco Lozano, Brian McEleney, Brenda Meaney, Ricardo Vázquez, Carmen Zilles.

Flordelino Lagundino (Director) is a director, actor, producer, and educator. He is the Producing Artistic Director of Theater Alaska. His directing credits include: Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Theater Alaska); Aubergine (Park Square Theatre); FOB (Drama League); Sweeney Todd, Doubt, Yellowman, Cedar House, Animals Out of Paper (Perseverance Theatre); Sweeney Todd (Juneau Symphony); Flipzoids, True West, Shakespeare’s R&J (Generator Theater Company). He participated in the TFANA Actors and Directors Project and received the SDCF Sir John Gielgud Classical Directing Fellowship and Drama League NY Directing Fellowship. Lagundino holds an MFA in directing from Brown University/Trinity Repertory Company, and an MFA in acting from University of Texas at Austin.

“Fuente Ovejuna (Mitchell)” is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc. www.concordtheatricals.com

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Orpheus Descending

By Tennessee Williams
Featuring Maggie Siff
Directed by Erica Schmidt
July 9 – August 6, 2023

“We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.” —Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending

Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending is a uniquely imaginative mix of styles. It is steamy and lyrical, a love story and a tragedy, blending realism, expressionism and poetry, and tells the story of the passion of two outcasts—Lady Torrance, a storekeeper’s wife and daughter of a murdered Sicilian bootlegger and Val, a wandering guitar player—and their doomed attempt to escape from a Southern Hell. Set in a dry-goods store in the 1950s deep South, the play’s toxic brew of racist violence, bigotry, misogyny, provincialism, and sexual passion evokes an American past that unfortunately is not the past, and that seethes with hatred, savagery, and longing for liberation. Maggie Siff will play Lady Torrance.

Frank Rich, in his 1989 New York Times review of Orpheus Descending, wrote that the play was “a pivotal chapter in the author’s canon, reverberating throughout his career.” Erica Schmidt, who adapted and directed Shakespeare’s Macbeth for seven schoolgirls entitled Mac Beth (“raucously exuberant,” New York Times Critics Pick), stages, in her TFANA debut, this seldom-seen Williams masterpiece.

Maggie Siff (Actor) is about to start shooting the seventh season of Showtime’s Billions (three Satellite Award nominations). She is also known for the FX series Sons of Anarchy (two Critics’ Choice Award nominations), and for playing “Rachel Menken” on the first season of AMC’s Mad Men (Screen Actors Guild Award nomination). Recent films include The Short History of the Long Road, A Woman/A Part, The Sweet Life, The Fifth Wave, One Percent More Humid, and Concussion. Siff is also an established theater actress, starring most recently in Signature Theatre’s production of Curse of the Starving Class, as well as in A Lie of the Mind at the New Group (directed by Ethan Hawke) and in Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew at TFANA. 

Erica Schmidt (Director) adapted/directed Cyrano with The National (Goodspeed, New Group); and directed MacBeth (Lucille Lortel, Hunter Theater Project, Drama Desk nominations for Best Direction and Revival and Lortel nomination for Best Revival); All the Fine Boys (The New Group); Richard 2 (The Old Globe); A Month in the Country (Classic Stage Company); Taking Care of Baby (Manhattan Theatre Club); Humor Abuse (co-creator/director; MTC, The Taper; Lucille Lortel Award); Rent (Tokyo); Trust (The Play Company, Callaway Award nominee); As You Like It (The Public Theater); Debbie Does Dallas (adapted/directed Off-Broadway; Princess Grace Award 2001). Schmidt wrote the screenplay for Cyrano (BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Film).

 

NOW CLOSED

Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski

By Clark Young and Derek Goldman
Featuring David Strathairn
Directed by Derek Goldman
New York Premiere
September 10 – October 16, 2022

By Denis Johnson
CAST: Johanna Day, Arliss Howard, Hari Nef, Michael Shannon, Heather Alicia Simms
Directed by Arin Arbus
New York Premiere
In association with Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia, and Evenstar Films
December 10, 2022 – January 8, 2023

“I have a feeling God finds us pretty funny. But that’s all the speaking I should do for God—he doesn’t go around talking about me.” —Denis Johnson, New York Magazine

In a seedy apartment on the edge of Des Moines, an unlikely assortment of people come together for an impromptu party that takes them, by the evening’s end, on a dam bursting ride down a stream-of-consciousness deluge. Downing depth chargers and singing karaoke, they struggle with the strange and unholy trinity of life, death, and sex in this work filled with dark humor and mystery. “What I write about,” Johnson observed, “Is the dilemma of living in a fallen world and asking why it is like this if there’s supposed to be a God.”

Michiko Kakutani in her 2017 Appraisal of Denis Johnson in The New York Times observed, “He used his startling gift for language to create word pictures as detailed and visionary, and as varied, as paintings by Edward Hopper and Hieronymus Bosch, capturing the lives of outsiders — the lost, the dispossessed, the damned — with empathy and unsparing candor…There is a fierce, ecstatic quality to Mr. Johnson’s strongest work that lends his characters and their stories an epic, almost mythic dimension, in the best American tradition of Melville and Whitman.”

Denis Johnson (Playwright) is the author of nine novels, three books of verse, two short story collections, a novella, and seven plays. He received many awards and honors, including The National Book Award for Fiction (Tree of Smoke), the Library of Congress Award for American Fiction, and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review. In 2014, Denis Johnson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two of his works were adapted into a film: his book of short stories, Jesus’ Son, starring Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton, and most recently Stars at Noon, directed by Claire Denis. His plays have been produced in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle.

Arin Arbus (Director) is the Resident Director at TFANA, where she most recently directed the critically acclaimed The Merchant of Venice starring John Douglas Thompson. On Broadway, she directed Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Tony nom for best revival) starring Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon.

NOW CLOSED

Richard II and Henry IV

JANUARY 26 – FEBRUARY 5, 2023

EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHOPS/EXPLORING THE HISTORIES

Richard II
By William Shakespeare
Featuring
Christian Camargo as King Richard & Thomas Jay Ryan as Henry Bolingbroke

and

Henry IV
By William Shakespeare, adapted by Dakin Matthews
Featuring
Susannah Perkins as Prince Hal; Tom Pecinka as Henry Percy;
Cara Ricketts as Lady Percy; Thomas Jay Ryan as King Henry IV;
and Jay O. Sanders as Sir John Falstaff

Performed In Alternating Repertory by

Heidi Armbruster, Jordan Bellow, Christian Camargo, Byron Jennings, Brenda Meaney, Ajay Naidu, Tom Pecinka, Susannah Perkins, Julia Randall, Cara Ricketts, Michael Rogers, Thomas Jay Ryan, Jamie Sanders, Jay O. Sanders, Krystal Sobaskie

 

Jimmy Stubbs, Scenic Designer; Nicole Lang, Lighting Designer;
Andrew Wade, Voice Director; Diane Healy, Production Stage Manager;
Jonathan Kalb, Dramaturg

 

Directed by Eric Tucker

 

Running Times:
Richard II: 2:30 plus one intermission
Henry IV: 3:05 plus two intermissions
No reserved seating; all seats general admission.

In EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHOPS/EXPLORING THE HISTORIES, the audience will be limited to 150 per performance, seated in-the-round with direct connection to an Ensemble of Actors working script-in-hand with minimal scenery, costumes, and lighting. It will be like attending an open rehearsal in which the Ensemble is exploring and experimenting rather than giving finished performances. The audience will be part of the process. The intimacy of the setting will enable actors and audience to discover together the worlds of the plays: families, parents and children, the journey from absolute monarchy to flawed kingship and civil war.

Richard II, Shakespeare’s prequel to Henry IV,  featuring Christian Camargo as King Richard and Thomas Jay Ryan as Henry Bolingbroke, is the story of a vain King Richard, ordained by god, who is deposed by the strong-willed and politically savvy Henry Bolingbroke. This powerful work, written entirely in verse, is renowned for its extraordinary  language and exploration of usurpation, legitimacy, and the divine right of kings.

Henry IV, Dakin Matthews’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 into a single three-act, three-hour play, features Susannah Perkins as Prince Hal; Tom Pecinka as Henry Percy; Cara Ricketts as Lady Percy; Thomas Jay Ryan as King Henry IV; and Jay O. Sanders as Sir John Falstaff. Matthews’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s two plays covering Bolingbroke’s turbulent reign was last produced in New York in 2003 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre where it won multiple Tony Awards, as well as a special Drama Desk Award.

Matthews writes, “There is a long tradition of combining these two plays into one, stretching back to the early 17^th Century, because the first part, as glorious as it is, leaves the full story untold, and three of the four major character arcs unfinished. And though Part One is quite popular—thanks no doubt to the remarkable character of Falstaff—the chance of ever seeing Part Two is very slim for most audiences; and leaving the full story hanging deprives them of experiencing the full scope of Shakespeare’s vision. To achieve the condensation, I have interpolated crucial early scenes from Part Two into the first two acts, and then finished the third act with mostly Part Two material. In the process, some characters are eliminated or conflated, and some scenes are abridged, combined, or omitted. But the gain has been the recovery of the full sweep of history, in which Shakespeare explores what makes a good ruler and a healthy commonwealth in times of crisis and sedition.”

Eric Tucker is the artistic director of Bedlam theater company, “the adventurously lo-fi theater troupe that has earned a reputation for joyfully reinvigorating classic texts, from Hamlet and St. Joan to Sense & Sensibility and Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet, a riff on two plays at once, Shakespeare’s youthful romantic tragedy and Chekhov’s mature and moody comedy.” (Sara Holdren, New York Magazine).

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All of the above productions offer free complementary humanities programming exploring the language and ideas of the authors and productions.

 

TFANA Talks: post-performance conversations with artists and thinkers that take place during the run of each production.

 

360 Viewfinder: an online publication exploring each production. 

 

 

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Enhanced Flexibility This Season

 

TFANA will also continue its popular New Deal Program, which offers $20 tickets for the best available seats at all performances for all productions, for those age 30 and under or full-time students of any age. (Proof of age or full-time student status required.) Click here to learn more.