People of the Year
WHAT'S HERE: Each year, nytheatre.com spotlights fifteen theatre artists and/or companies that have made a significant contribution to the cultural landscape of our city. Below are the People of the Year since 2004, when this recognition program began. Click here for more detailed information about the People of the Year for 2007.
2007
The Chocolate Factory: This Long Island City venue, under the leadership of Brian Rogers, is quickly becoming one of NYC's go-to theatres for audiences in search of inventive and challenging work.
Tim Cusack & Jason Jacobs (Theatre Askew): Together and separately, the two leaders of Theatre Askew—actor/director/producer Tim Cusack and director/producer Jason Jacobs—consistently spotlight important social issues without ever sacrificing entertainment value.
Kevin Doyle: Writer/director Kevin Doyle was seemingly everywhere this year, with no fewer than five productions in the works at such venues as chashama, the Pretentious Festival, and FringeNYC.
Electric Pear Productions: Under the leadership of co-executive producer Melanie Sylvan, this adventurous company is stretching the boundaries of theatre with adventurous works like Synesthesia.
FRIGID Festival: NYC's newest theatre festival, produced by Horse Trade Theatre Group at their three intimate East Village spaces, brought artists from all over the country to brighten up the winter season.
Mia Katigbak: As an actor, as co-founder of the National Asian American Theatre Festival, and as artistic director of National Asian American Theatre Company, Mia Katigbak helped remind audiences of the astonishing diversity of the NYC theatre scene.
Cyndy A. Marion: This talented young director helmed new productions of plays by Tennessee Williams and Leslie Lee, among others, at the Abingdon Theatre, La MaMa, and more.
Metropolitan Playhouse: Now in its 16th season, this Alphabet City company is the only NYC theatre that consistently offers theatergoers the opportunity to look backward at American history and drama.
Edith O'Hara: At 90, the founder and artistic director of Thirteenth Street Repertory Theatre, home of the longest-running off-off-Broadway show in history, faces the most significant challenges in her career as she rallies to save her theatre from real estate developers.
Mac Rogers: Versatile playwright and actor Mac Rogers worked onstage and behind the scenes on a variety of projects this year, including the award-winning Hail, Satan at FringeNYC.
T. Schreiber Studio: This long-running acting studio, headed by acclaimed teacher/actor/director Terry Schreiber, has become one of indie theater's treasures, featuring first-class productions of classic and new plays with incomparable (and award-winning) production values. Coming up at T. Schreiber Studio: The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams, directed by Schreiber (Feb 21 - Mar 30), and The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard / The Actor's Nightmare by Christopher Durang, directed by Peter Jensen (May 8 - Jun 15).
Storm Theatre: Helmed by artistic director Peter Dobbins, the Storm distinguished itself this year with a fine new play (John Regis's Linnea) plus the unprecented and invaluable festival of plays by Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II).
Trav S.D.: NYC's number one Renaissance Man of the Theater, Trav S.D. acted in, wrote, directed, produced, and composed an astonishing number of new works this year...in addition to hosting nytheatrecast's popular monthly Indie Theater Now series.
Ken Urban: Playwright Ken Urban had two outstanding new works in NYC this year, along with several others in development, plus other productions across the country.
Jose Zayas: With his company The Immediate Theatre Company, and with other companies such as Repertorio Espanol, he is becoming one of the NYC's hottest directors. You can also see him at the HERE Arts Center, where he's been on staff at the box office for several years.
2006
Aisling Arts: Founded by Bryn Manion and Wendy Remington, they helped make Long Island City one of the new go-to locations for cutting-edge theatre in 2006. Plus they scored a hit at FringeNYC with their take on The Beggar's Opera.
Blue Coyote Theater Group: Comprised of Kyle Ancowitz, Robert Buckwalter, Gary Shrader, and Stephen Speights, they pushed the envelope with two outstanding premieres plus the gutsy Standards of Decency Project.
John Clancy and Nancy Walsh: Collectively Clancy Productions, they took NYC by storm during the first half of 2006 with a string of edgy shows. John capped the season by winning an Obie Award for sustained achievement in directing.
CollaborationTown: A young company comprised of Boston University grads, they made their mark with three very contemporary plays at the Red Room, Manhattan Theatre Source, and FringeNYC.
Edward Einhorn: The driving force behind not one but two theatre festivals this year: Neurofest at the beginning of 2006 and the Havel Festival at the end.
Tim Errickson: As artistic director of Boomerang Theatre Company, he produced four successful shows this year, and directed one more. He also serves as a leader of off-off-Broadway's Community Dish.
Handcart Ensemble: One of indie theater's small jewels, they brought the works of two brilliant Irish poets—Yeats and Heaney—to the stage this year at their charming space on West 47th Street.
Christopher Lueck: Chris helped bring the time-honored art of clown to the fore in a year when clowning seemed to be everywhere. He co-produces the New York Downtown Monthly Clown Revue.
Taylor Mac: This gender-bending performance artist had a breakthrough year not only in New York but all over the world. His new one-man show, coming to the Public Theater in January, will tour Australia and Europe in 2007.
Kevin Newbury: This young director made strong impressions with two very different plays: David Johnston's smart fantasy Candy and Dorothy and Tom Rowan's incisive dramedy Kiss and Cry.
Partial Comfort Productions: This impressive young company, whose artistic directors are Chad Beckim and Molly Pearson, had a great year, producing three premieres including Beckim's harrowing modern tragedy 'nami.
Prospect Theater Company: Headed by Cara Reichel, this company specializes in new musicals, and scored two big successes this year with Iron Curtain and The Flood.
Debargo Sanyal: Versatile actor Sanyal was also one of the year's most prolific artists, appearing in at least half a dozen different roles this year, in new plays from America, India, and even one musical.
Christine Simpson: Playwright, producer, and performer, she looked at the life of Franz Kafka in her new play The Great Conjurer and at her own life, as an adopted child, in her FringeNYC solo piece Take On Me!
Daniel Talbott: Daniel wears the hats of director, producer, and actor. His company Rising Phoenix Repertory, in residence at Jimmy's No. 43, helped pioneer early-evening theatre this year.
2005
P. Seth Bauer: Works by this prolific, talented young playwright seemed to be everywhere this year: The Karma Cookie (78th Street Theatre Lab), the Atrainplays (The Neighborhood Playhouse), Vermouth & Chicken (in Fully Pact from Playwrights/Actors Contemporary Theater, and Stop the Lawns in Revenge 2 from TheDrillingCompaNY), among others. Bauer was the first recipient of the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Short Script for The First Time Out of Bounds.
Bluemouth, Inc.: One of the year's single most exciting theatre events was lenz, by Stephen O'Connell and Sabrina Reeves, the high-energy, enormously visceral, site-specific interactive play that bluemouth, inc. staged, for two weekends only, at Ye Olde Carlton Arms Hotel. This Toronto-based troupe is redefining the rules of theatre and how audiences experience it.
The Brick Theatre: This hot Williamsburg company is artistic home to some of the city's most adventurous theatre practitioners. The vibe here remains terrific: Brick's list of hits in 2005 included John A. Wooden's Dear Dubya: Love Letters to whitehouse.org; Ian Hill's World Gone Wrong, Peter Petralia's Third Person, and Cole Kazdin's My Year of Porn (all seen in the Moral Values Festival); 31 Down's That's Not How Mahler Died; and Michael Gardner's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.
Sharon Fogarty: As a playwright/composer, she distinguished herself with two brand new musicals (or "unmusicals," as she sometimes calls them)—the rambunctious and irreverent Where Sleeping Gods Lie and the edgier The Devil of Delancey Street. As an actor—in addition to playing leading roles in the aforementioned two shows—she gave a bravura performance in Manhattan Theatre Source's production of Sally Clark's Saint Frances of Hollywood. And as a director, she helmed Jason Grossman's It's a Wonderful (One Man Show) Life.
Steven Gridley: Indisputably one of the smartest and most innovative young playwright/directors working in New York's indie theatre scene, Gridley's latest work Still Life-With Runner was developed at HERE's American Living Room Festival and then had a successful run this fall at Spring Theatreworks in DUMBO. His earlier work Sun, Stand Thou Still, meanwhile, was produced in Norway, at Skidmore College, and (in excerpted form) at the American College Theater Festival.
Impetuous Theater Group: Though they're only about a year old, this company—led by James David Jackson, Josh Sherman, and Joe Powell—has already proved themselves one to keep an eye on, with their impressive FringeNYC debut this summer, Venezuela, and their terrific absurdist satire on Corporate America, Office Sonata (written by Andy Chmelko), in December.
David Korins: Many of this year's most memorable and inventive sets were the product of the imagination of this young designer, including Orange Flower Water (produced by Edge Theater Company, which he co-founded with Carolyn Cantor), Swimming in the Shallows (Second Stage), Oedipus at Palm Springs (New York Theatre Workshop), Miss Witherspoon (Playwrights Horizons), and Dog Sees God (Century Center), among others.
Lincoln Center Theater: No long-running company presented more significant work this year than LCT. Their year began with Lynn Ahrens & Stephen Flaherty's flawed but earnest Dessa Rose; continued with the Craig Lucas-Adam Guettel The Light in the Piazza, which, with its luminous leading performance by Victoria Clark, revived hope in the future of serious American musical plays; and then peaked with Wendy Wasserstein's uncompromising look at contemporary mores, Third.
Mark Lonergan: He started the year with the stunning full-length dance work Powerhouse and ended it with the remarkable and innovative physical comedy theatre piece This Way That Way. Lonergan's vision and talent mark him as one of the great theatre directors of the next decade or so.
Susan O'Connor: One of downtown theatre's best-kept secrets finally made her (richly deserved) off-Broadway debut in Urban Stages' splendid production of Daniel MacIvor's Marion Bridge. O'Connor—seen earlier this year in Brad Fraser's dark comedy-drama Snake in Fridge—got unanimous raves for her portrayal of an odd young woman who is trying to assert her own quirky individuality in the face of two strong-willed older sisters who have come to visit when their mother becomes terminally ill.
Austin Pendleton: One of contemporary theatre's authentic Renaissance Men, Pendleton batted a triple this year, directing Barbara Dana's War in Paramus with sensitivity and intelligence for Abingdon Theatre Company; penning one of the year's most entertaining and thoughtful new plays, Orson's Shadow at the Barrow Street Theatre; and topping himself with a terrific turn at the Broadway Cabaret Festival where he performed a knockout "Miracle of Miracles," re-creating the role of Motel the Tailor that he originated in Fiddler on the Roof more than 40 years ago.
Six Figures Theatre Company: Of the many theatre works this year inspired by and/or reflective of the current situation in Iraq, few packed the emotional wallop of Baghdad Burning. Based on a blog by an anonymous Iraqi woman living through the war, this play by Kim Kefgen and Loren Ingrid Noveck brought the conflict's impact on ordinary individuals home to NYC audiences in a very personal and visceral way. We hear it may be coming back. Six Figures, currently helmed by artistic director Cris Buchner, also produced their biggest and best Artists of Tomorrow Festival this fall, providing developmental runs to a variety of worthy new plays, solo shows, and performance works.
Stolen Chair Theatre Company: Led by director Jon Stancato, this young movement-based troupe is rapidly becoming one of our most reliably entertaining and engaging companies. In Commedia Dell'Artemisia they superimposed a Moliere-style slapstick farce on a Renaissance rape trial; in The Man Who Laughs they staged a Victor Hugo melodrama as a live silent movie.
Theatre Ten Ten: New York's longest-running off-off-Broadway company (they started up more than 50 years ago) had one of their most fruitful seasons in recent memory, including two classy revivals of seldom-seen masterworks (Shaw's The Apple Cart and Turgenev's A Month in the Country, both directed by David Scott) plus a chipper re-creation of British Music Hall called A Little of What You Fancy.
Unofficial New York Yale Cabaret: Another group making an impressive debut this year is this ambitious company helmed by co-artistic directors Mahayana Landowne and George Tynan Crowley. Composed of Yale alumni, they're in the middle of an exciting first season that has already included an impressive original play by Crowley (Most Happy) and the American premiere of a Malaysian work called Three Children.
2004
The Brick Theatre: The intimate Williamsburg storefront occupied by the Brick Theater (Michael Gardner and Robert Honeywell, co-artistic directors) might seem like an unlikely venue for the city's zippiest summer festival, but the Hell Festival charmed our reviewers and audiences last summer. The Brick was also home to Jeffrey Lewonczyk's well-crafted revival of Witkiewicz's The Pragmatists, Assurbanipal Babilla's Assyrian Monkey Fantasy, and the parody Who Is Wilford Brimley? The Musical. They're just one reason why Williamsburg is a go-to neighborhood for up-and-coming theatre.
Feed the Herd Theatre Company: Some of the most exciting and adventurous work we saw all year was mounted in Feed the Herd's Stampede Festival in January, including Kevin Doyle's sophisticated absurdist piece Styrofoam and Eric Michael Kochmer's antic Chekhov parody Platonov! Platonov! Platonov!. The Herd also presented Kochmer's experimental Fragments of Ricky the Superhero last summer.
Matt Freeman: He gave us two extraordinarily interesting plays this year: The Great Escape, an absurdist farce in which two adult children hold their mother hostage, which is quite possibly an allegory about the Bush administration; and The Americans, a monologue play about three men who are caught up in a spectacular catastrophe caused by a poem that makes its author's apartment explode. In terms of imagination, vision, and intellect, Freeman has few equals among his under-thirty playwriting peers.
Invisible City Theatre Company: They mounted no fewer than five productions at their home base, Manhattan Theatre Source. Strange Attractions, written and directed by David Epstein, and Airport Hilton, written by Anthony Jaswinksi and directed by Epstein, were both terrific new plays. They capped their year with a splendid revival of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, proving, among other things, that it is still possible to see exceptional, challenging theatre for $15 in New York City.
Kelly McAllister: In addition to serving as one of nytheatre.com's regular reviewers, McAllister acted (and sang) as Boxer in Synapse Productions' excellent revival of Animal Farm; directed and co-produced a musical called Die, Die, Diana at the New York International Fringe Festival, and wrote a fine new drama called Burning the Old Man, produced by Boomerang Theatre Company in September.
Allison Moore: The Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky will be the next venue for Hazard County, the breakthrough play penned by Moore. It had its New York premiere in October in a stunning production staged by Blake Lawrence for the Themantics Group. Moore also contributed an entertaining short comedy called CUTRS to TheDrillingCompaNY's evening of one-acts called HONOR.
Qui Nguyen and Robert Ross Parker: AKA the Vampire Cowboys, they started the year off with a bang with the New York premiere of their wildly irreverent trio of action comedies Vampire Cowboy Trilogy, which went on to the New York International Fringe Festival. Nguyen also fight directed the new musical It's Karate, Kid! and he's contributing a new short play to Metropolitan Playhouse's East Village Chronicles in January. Parker is currently starring as Victor in The Flying Machine's excellent adaptation of Frankenstein at Soho Rep.
Peter S. Petralia: Among the dozens of avant-garde/experimental works that we saw this year, nothing stood out so profoundly as Petralia's About Silence, a startling and original performance piece, written and directed by Petralia, in which three actors spontaneously react to a poetic text that they are reading, on stage, from laptop computers.
Playwrights Horizons: This long-running company really stretched its audiences this year, we think, with Craig Lucas's remarkable Small Tragedy last spring and Quincy Long's splendid and timely People Be Heard this fall.
Kevin Rice: In an election year when lots and lots of folks attempted to satirize the current administration, playwright Rice seemed to be the only one who really got it right with his hilarious comedy Amerikus Rex, in which the family of Augustus Caesar was expanded to include a wayward son named Cornelius who was banished to the western hemisphere after he invaded the wrong country.
Brian Rogers: His company theater et al is another nexus for envelope-pushing, challenging work. In April, Rogers gave us a spatially virtuosic staging of Audit (with text by Ryan Vemmer); in October his stripped-down, three-person Three Sisters was part of the Chekhov Now Festival.
Adriano Shaplin: Young triple-threat theatre artist Shaplin cut a bit of a swath in the off-off-Broadway world this year with two splashy productions, Hell Meets Henry Halfway (which he wrote) and Pugilist Specialist (which he wrote, directed, and acted in), a stingingly sharp and spare satire of militarism that had its New York premiere at the spiffy new 59e59 theatre complex.
Vital Theatre Company: In addition to producing a roster of diverse and often excellent new work this year, Stephen Sunderlin, artistic director, moved his company uptown to new quarters at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre. Some of the triumphs in 2004 for this prolific group include the short play collection This Is Your Brain On..., a solid revival of Sherwood's Idiot's Delight, Mike Teele's fine family comedy/drama Cedarwood Avenue, another excellent rendition of the perennial Vital Signs new play festival, and—our personal favorite—the Republican Convention "welcome wagon" variety revue, Make Nice? My Ass!
Anne Washburn: She made us sit up and take notice twice this year, first with her collaboration with Anne Kauffman and The Civilians, The Ladies, and second with her insightful comedy The Internationalist.
Sam Younis: He won the Playwriting Award at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival for Browntown, his timely and intelligent comedy about stereotyped casting among Arab American actors in the post-9/11 world. Younis co-produced and acted in his play, too; and he also appeared in the ensemble of the excellent Pulling the Lever, a docudrama about minority political attitudes in the USA.
