Monday, May 21, 2007  | Mr. A's Amazing Maze Plays! Friday! collectiveP.A.S.T. @ chashama & The Ateh Theater Group present Mr. A's Amazing Maze Plays
By: Alan Ayckbourn ] Directed by: Carlton Ward
With: Charley Layton, Madeleine Maby, Sara Montgomery, Elizabeth Neptune & Ben Wood
First & last Friday of every month + FREE DRINKS from Best Cellars!
May 25th: 10:30 PM June 1st: 9:30 PM June 29th: 10:30 PM July 6th: 10:30 PM July 27th: 10:30 PM At: Collective PAST @ chashama 217 E. 42nd Street between 3rd and 2nd Avenues
Tickets: $10 -- For tickets, go to www.Ateh.org or call smarttix.com (212) 868-4444
chashama is a NYC arts organization whose mission is to support artists of all genres. chashama "adopts" vacant properties that are donated by their owners and converts them into theaters, galleries, studios, and window performance sites; chashama then regrants this space for free or at heavily subsidized rates. Since 1995, chashama has transformed more than 20 vacant properties and has given more than 5,000 artists access to space.
For information on group tickets please call (646) 281-1980. | |
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| Thursday, April 26, 2007 | Party on Tuesday!! Hello everyone! I hope those of you living in New York are planning on attending this kickass event. Our company is joining forces with three other amazing companies to create theater and art and music all summer long! Help us kick off the residency at Chashama on Tuesday after work! Booze and food included! Here's the info: collectiveP.A.S.T. PRODUCTION COMPANY ATEH THEATER GROUP SUM OF US THEATRE CO. THIRSTY TURTLE PRODUCTIONS
@chashama WHO: collectiveP.A.S.T. @ chashama WHAT: Fundraising Benefit
WHEN: Tuesday, May 1, 2007 - 6:30pm-9:30pm
WHERE: chashama 217 East 42nd Street, New York
HOW MUCH: $25/per person Come and support collectiveP.A.S.T. @ chashama! Have a drink! Sample foods from our neighborhood restaurants! Enjoy a brand new art installation, film screenings and more as you meet and mingle with members of collectiveP.A.S.T. as we launch our six-month residency at chashama's 217 East 42nd Street space! collectiveP.A.S.T. is a consortium of four emerging theater companies: Production Company, Ateh Theater Group, Sum of Us Theater Company and Thirsty Turtle Productions. collectiveP.A.S.T. serves as a community of producing artists with a variety of experiences, backgrounds, missions and strengths. We are thrilled to announce this six-month residency at chashama, presenting new works by various theater companies, dance companies, musicians and visual artists. Chashama has kindly agreed to post our calendar of events on their website so keep a look out for opportunities to see these exciting new works at www.chashama.org. Stay tuned!
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| Friday, March 16, 2007 | United Stages: GD is "gleefully odd, fearsomely intelligent" According to a couple of popular hard-boiled philosophers, Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler, we're all holding out for a rescuer: a fantasy hero of sublime contradictions, familiar yet unnamable, the answer to our loneliness and troubles. This month at The Connelly Theater, the ambitious Ateh Theater Group presents exhibit A: The Girl Detective, a play as slippery as its subject matter. Bridgette Dunlap's adaptation of Kelly Link's short story unfurls with the strange and causal logic of dreams, blending the magic surrealism of fairy tales with the "just the facts, ma'am" trajectory of detective fiction. It's a gleefully odd, fearsomely intelligent production that challenges the audience to take on the mystery of human longing: the possibility of finding that missing person—that person that one sometimes believes one sees in another's eyes. The play's namesake is a local celebrity, the object of obsessive gossip and community reportage. But the more witnesses obsess about her whereabouts, the less they can agree on any particular fact, including the color of her hair. Ironies accumulate as The Girl Detective searches for her missing mother while everyone else in the play looks for The Girl Detective. Weird and wondrous, Dunlap leads us from locations like The Girl Detective's kitchen, where she's stopped eating food and started eating dreams; to the bank where twelve tap dancing female bank robbers break into vaults and fill them with single socks, lost homework and Amelia Earhart; to a dance club in the underworld. ..> ..>  | | Marie Weller, Sara Montgomery, Kathryn Ekblad, Danielle Thorpe, Madeleine Maby and Alexis Grausz
Photograph by Anthony Collins | The ensemble is tight, and Ben Wood as Guy is a particular standout. Whitney Strock creates exuberant dance numbers, and set and costume designer Emily French brings Dunlap's vision alive. The few simple set pieces create a playground for the shifting dreamscape of the play, and the trench coat and feather costumes incant the bright mystery of this world. If you should go looking for The Girl Detective during this limited engagement, be sure to pack a mirror as well as a looking glass. Bridgette Dunlap has created a theatrical experience to find yourself in again and again. -Maggie Cino, United Stages
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| Ellen Kushner: "funny and entertaining and moving" "Smart & coherent, with a crisply competent ensemble cast, it manages to capture the dreamy dislocation and strict emotional logic of Link's work, taking it out of the realm of pure language into a lot of very clever staging: visual, kinesthetic, musical . . . leaving you with that same feeling that you've understood nothing and comprehended everything. It's also funny and entertaining and moving - the tap-dancing, boa-wearing bank robbing lineup alone is worth the price of admission. " -Ellen Kushner
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| Thursday, March 08, 2007 | Feature story on the Ateh in Back Stage You can check out Leonard Jacobs' article on the Ateh in the print edition of this week's Back Stage magazine.
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| Village Voice: The Girl Detective is "mesmerizing" ..> ..> | Clue Love A fairy-tale sleuth seeks out missing memories by Katie Baker March 6th, 2007 7:49 PM | | At the beginning of The Girl Detective, an adaptation of Kelly Link's postmodern fairy tale, our titular sleuth (captivatingly played by Kathryn Ekblad) is presented with her latest case: a bank robbery committed by 12 beauties in boas and black masks who tap-dance their way into tellers' hearts and vaults. In their wake, the underworld spills out into safes and missing things begin to reappear— retainers, mismatched socks, even Amelia Earhart. Turns out, the Girl Detective knows all about the underworld—she goes there every night in other people's dreams to search for her missing mother. And as this mesmerizing play progresses, it comes to resemble a dream. Odd characters waltz through—Chinese waiters, 12 dancing sisters. In the under world, words and images are slippery, memory is unstable, and things that mean the most to us (like the color of our lover's eyes) threaten to disappear faster than the Girl Detective can changes disguises. Beneath its fizzy fun, the play asks a question that haunts our nightmares: What if life is a series of increasingly serious losses—first, a cat runs away, then our husband vamooses with the secretary, then we forget our mother's face—until the underworld claims all and we are left with nothing? | The Girl Detective
Adapted by Bridgette Dunlap from a story by Kelly Link
The Connelly Theater
220 East 4th Street
212-352-3101 http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0710,baker,76007,20.html
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| Friday, March 02, 2007 | The Ateh raises $1,300 for the Brooklyn Bureau The Ateh is hosting a benefit performance of Alice for the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service on March 10th. The performance will be attended by children in the Bureau's preventive programs and the first batch of checks came in today. Thanks to the Bureau's wonderful donors!
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| Backstage: Ekblad is versatile enough to project both an innocence and a wisdom The Girl Detective is filled with, "magic moments that are used to convey a story that seems almost impossible to translate effectively to the stage, but is done with a style and wit to create postmodern mythology" according to Backstage. read the review here: http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/nyc/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003552632
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| Monday, February 26, 2007 | The Girl Detective reviewed by Jon Sobel of Blogcritics.com Theater Review: The Girl Detective
Written by Jon SobelPublished February 24, 2007 Reading "The Girl Detective," a celebrated short story by Nebula and World Fantasy award winner Kelly Link, one might see potential for either a wonderful or a terrible stage adaptation. Although full of surprising imagery in motion, with fantastic settings, colorful characters, dancing language and dancing people, the story ultimately succeeds because of the author's narrative voice.
That unique slant or sheen is important in any kind of prose but absolutely essential to a short story. Link's tale, like the best fairy stories ancient or modern, casts an unbroken word-spell. It's an experimental, unconventionally plotted story that hangs together on the strength of a narrative voice that says things like this: "Someone else is dreaming about the house they lived in as a child. The girl detective breaks off a bit of their house. It pools in her mouth like honey." Can that cool style translate to a setting where the narration and dialogue are split among a big cast of actors, and an audience must be engaged?
The answer, happily, is yes. Thanks to crisp direction, winning performances by a talented cast, and above all, brilliant choreography, the Ateh Theater Group's production, at the beautiful Connelly Theater in Manhattan's East Village, is a pleasure.
Adhering closely to the text of the story, the show starts off in chilly fashion. In fact, one fears one is in for an evening of stiff, postmodern conceptualizing, as the cast pops in and out delivering lines like they're hot potatoes. It might have been opening night jitters, or simply the viewer needing to adjust to the disjointed rhythm of a non-traditional narrative - probably a bit of both. Then, a few minutes in, the tap-dancing bank robbers breeze on stage.
Led by Birthday (the buoyant Alexis Grausz, who has the makings of a Broadway star), the dancers set the humorous and playful tone that infuse the rest of the story even in its more somber moments. Show and audience find their rhythm and suddenly warm up. The game is afoot.
The plot, such as it is, has to do with the title character — played with regal innocence by the tall, spectral Kathryn Ekblad — searching for her missing mother while trailed by the nameless narrator (Ben Wood). He's a combination of stalker ex-boyfriend, wood nymph, and Ariel from The Tempest. The two are only marginally "leads," though, in a production driven by crisp pacing, divine dancing, and an ensemble of actors (who clearly love working together) making the most of their in-and-out parts. With clever lighting and a few props the stage becomes, alternately, the Girl Detective's neighborhood, her house, a Chinese restaurant, and the clubby Underworld, which is more Folies Bergère than Hades. But the show-stopper is a scene in which our heroine, who "eats dreams" (instead of food), darts among a mass of many people's dreams come to life. It's real theater magic.
What all of it means is open to interpretation, but by sticking closely to the original text the director, Bridgette Dunlap, has preserved the story's tone. Link's tale also has many layers, which, for the most part, also survive the transition. Is an explicit telling of the Persephone and Demeter myth - implicit in the original story - necessary? Does it have to be pointed out on stage that in fairy and fantasy tales, child heroes almost always lack at least one parent? Unclear. But in an adult show that also has kid appeal, some amount of explanation may be a plus. Certainly, the wonderful dancing and funny stage business help make the show a pleasure for all ages, in spite of the "mature themes" warning on the poster. This reviewer's inner child, for one, was as amused as his critical brain was tickled.
Through March 17 at the Connelly Theater in New York. Call 212-352-3101 for tickets or get them online.
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| The Girl Detective and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland open!
The Ateh Theater Group
presents
The Girl Detective
The Girl Detective is a master of disguise. She finds missing things, chases tap dancing back robbers and eats our dreams. But in her life of intrigue and adventure one mystery remains: the whereabouts of her long lost mother. Join her on a wild journey to the underworld in this surreal, darkly funny story of loss and reunion. adapted and directed by BRIDGETTE DUNLAP
from the book by KELLY LINK choreographed by WHITNEY STOCK "Kelly Link fuses storytelling smarts with postmodern flair, Nancy Drew with Philip K. Dick…
The Girl Detective is a sly disarticulation of whodunits and the underworld that's as fun to read as it is heartbreaking—a great pop coup, part tabloid headlines, part Joycean Ithaca.
—The Village Voice ("25 Favorite Books of 2001")
FOUR WEEK LIMITED ENGAGEMENT
February 23rd - March 17th The Connelly Theater, 220 East 4th Street, btw. avenues A & B
Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at 8PM
with an additional performance Monday, February 26 at 8PM
TICKETS ON SALE NOW AT WWW.ATEH.ORG
$15 212-352-3101 or 1-866-811-4111
or at the Connelly Theater Box Office 30 minutes prior to the show
Starring KATHRYN EKBLAD, SARA MONTGOMERY, ELIZABETH NEPTUNE, MADELEINE MABY, DANIELLE THORPE, BEN WOOD, MARIE WELLER, JOHN LONG*, CHARLEY LAYTON, TIM ELLIOT, CHRIS HALE, ALEXIS GRAUSZ* * actors appearing courtesy of Actors Equity Association Set and Costume Design by Emily French
Lighting Design by Michael Salvas
The Connelly Theater, 220 East 4th Street, btw. avenues A & B
And for kids...
Alice's Adventures
In Wonderland
As inspired an adaptation of a children's classic as I've ever seen... Bridgette Dunlap and her collaborators have created so much stunning visual comedy! -Laurel Graeber, The New York Times
FOUR WEEK LIMITED ENGAGEMENT
February 24th - March 17th
The Connelly Theater, 220 East 4th Street, Btw. A & B
Saturdays and Sundays at 12 PM
TICKETS ON SALE NOW AT WWW.ATEH.ORG
Regular ticket price: $15
212-352-3101 or 1-866-811-4111
or at the Connelly Theater Box Office 30 minutes prior to the show
The White Rabbit races by and Alice is off on a mad adventure that will turn her world upside down. ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND is a fun, frenetic re-imaging of Lewis Carroll's fantastic Cats, Queens and Caterpillars, and the feisty little girl unlike anyone they've met before.
Adapted and Directed by BRIDGETTE DUNLAP
from the book by Lewis Carroll
Starring KATHRYN EKBLAD, SARA MONTGOMERY, BRIAN MORGAN, ELIZABETH NEPTUNE, MADELEINE MABY, HANNAH MILLER, ELIZABETH TAYLOR, BEN WOOD, MARIE WELLER Costume Design by Amy VanMullekom
Lighting Design by Michael Salvas
Set Design by Emily French
For more information visit www.ateh.org.
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The benefit raised so much money for TLC that even after purchasing a bathrobe for every resident and ten alumni of the shelter, there was still money left for more presents. TLC's director, Bea Williams, told me the ladies could really use some washcloths and towels are always needed.
