Coming Soon: The Theater of Tomorrow

Target Margin Theater's 2009 Lab Series is devoted to American avant-garde work of the first half of the 20th Century. As they explain:

Long before Camino Real American theater artists were pushing the boundaries of their form. In our 2009 Lab, Target Margin Theater looks at some of the enormous range of work that sprang up in the early twentieth century. With the little theater movement, the WPA theater project, living newspapers, rising feminist consciousness, and the spread of European avant-garde movements in art, waves of American writers, actors, designers, directors, and musicians dreamed of a new theater: the theater of tomorrow we have inherited from them today.

The Lab includes (among other things) the following works:

A FAMILY OF PERHAPS THREE

by Gertrude Stein directed by David Herskovits

There may have been three of them. There may have been a play. There was then a play. The founding mother of us all teases out a memory and a story that is no story. We are all in this family of perhaps three.

Selections from COLD KEENER

by Zora Neale Hurston directed by Donya K. Washington

Drawing upon her folkloric studies, Hurston creates an angular structure. “Like African dance,” the pieces are linked through their differences in this collection of plays, as she abruptly changes the setting, mood and language to suggest the variety of ways to express black culture.

(oh my god I am so)THIRST(y)

(mostly) by Eugene O’Neill directed by Michael Levinton

Three desperate souls adrift at sea await the cruel, cruel fate bestowed on them by an angry God. A comedy which may or may not have absolutely nothing to do with race.

ARIA DA CAPO by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ásta Bennie Hostetter and Julia Jarcho revisit this modernist/pastoral mashup to snack on high style, violence, and macaroons. Performing with TOM.

TOM by e.e. cummings

directed by Kathleen Kennedy Tobin

Cummings’ never-performed scenario for a ballet based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, staged for puppets and paper cutouts. Performing with ARIA DA CAPO.

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT

by Zora Neale Hurston

A collaboration between TMT and the Bronx Prep Charter School, teaching artist Andrew Simon and his students from the South Bronx have cast themselves in Hurston’s short play set in a one room schoolhouse, culminating in a raucous, exuberant finale.

***

STEIN/WILDER NIGHT

(3 plays, 2 writers, 1 ticket!):

BONNIES OVER THE WATER

conceived and directed by Natalie Robin and the company. He was writing OUR TOWN. She was giving lecture tours around the world. But they had a lot of time to talk about their kitchens. Inspired by letters between Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, two dilettantes tap dance their way into the closest of friendships.

PULLMAN CAR HIAWATHA

by Thornton Wilder directed by John Kurzynowski

In Wilder’s 28-character one act, a train car and it’s passengers chart the pulses of American life as they collide physically, metaphysically, geographically, meteorologically, astronomically and theologically. Produced by special arrangement with Samuel French, Inc. New York City.

TELEPHONE/LANDSCAPE

(after Gertrude Stein) directed by Will Fulton

It’s about time Gertrude Stein put her money where her mouth is. Starting with the seed of Stein’s “For the Country Entirely,” designers will play a game of theatrical telephone until it all comes together into one cacophonous landscape of creative voices in dialogue.

All of this will happen May 17 - June 6 at THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY in Long Island City!

For Tickets: CLICK HERE