Drama League Award Nomination!

AMERICAN DREAMS has been nominated for a prestigious Drama League Award for Outstanding Interactive Theatre!

The Drama League Awards, the oldest theatrical honors in North America, will celebrate its 87th year by recognizing the extraordinary excellence in digital and socially-distanced theatrical work created during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based in New York City and historically honoring Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, this year’s ceremony has been redesigned to amplify the resiliency, experimentation, and innovation of the theatrical community across the country, in a year unlike any other in our history.

Foregoing historic categories to better reflect the digital and socially-distant work made during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 Awards Nominees were selected by the 400+ alumni of The Drama League’s programs for directors and theater artists. These alumni include Tony and Emmy Award winners, artistic directors at more than 60 theater companies across the United States, and noted industry professionals.

Voting by Drama League Members begins on Tuesday, March 30, 2021, and winners will be announced via the pre-recorded and virtual Awards event on Friday, May 21, 2021.

American Dreams was first premiered at the Cleveland Public Theatre and was scheduled to tour in 2020. When the pandemic hit, the show's creative team, with the JKW Foundation's support, retooled the show as a fully online interactive show. As the pandemic took hold, more and more theatres joined the online tour, filling up the entire fall and stretching coast to coast, making it one of the biggest theatrical events of 2020.

The American Dreams tour was conceived by Leila Buck, Amanda Cooper, Jens Rasmussen, and Tamilla Woodard and lead produced by Working Theater in NYC. Partner theatres included: ASU Gammage, Texas Performing Arts, Round House Theatre, Salt Lake Acting Company, TheaterWorks, and Marin Theatre Company.

BLOODWORK - Currently in Development

 

A collaboration between Jens Rasmussen and Lucy Flournoy. After years of working together on various projects, BLOODWORK emerged from discussions around what audiences will need on the other side of the pandemic. The next developmental phase will happen in the Spring of 2021. 

WASHINGTON POST - “American Dreams” makes you soul search

A vigorous live-streamed interactive play that ponders and satirizes America’s naturalization policies. Able actors add humor, liveliness, and intensity. The varied format is bracing, as is the interactivity.

American Dreams has a New Presence!

After an acclaimed premiere, American Dreams is entering a new phase!

As part of the goal to bring this work to as many people as possible a new website www.AmericanDreamsPlay.com has been launched.

On the site, you can learn about American Dreams, how it was created, as well as read reviews, and meet the creative team.

Check it out and share.

SEEN BY/EVERYONE - Talkin' Broadway Review

Everything about the production works.

You might expect Seen / By Everyone, the new work at HERE by the collective known as Five On A Match, to be a comic satire, drawing as it does from actual postings on various forms of social media. Even the physical setting, a karaoke bar with the audience members seated at club tables on two sides of the performance space, suggests a fun evening of catty eavesdropping. Surprisingly, however, what unfolds through disjointed conversations (its creators refer to it as a "collage" rather than a play) is an emotionally powerful portrait of love and loss, and of individuals coming to grips with both. 

 Kudos, to begin with, to the members of Five On A Match (Matthew Cohn, Amir Darvish, Meg MacCary, Enormvs Muñoz, and Jen Taher) for both the tremendous amount of effort they must have put in to pull together a coherent whole from the world of sources available to them. And even more plaudits for the respect with which they have treated the revelatory material, representative of real if unidentified people trying to make sense of their lives in the public forum of social media. 

 The bar where the evening unfolds is called Acheron, named for the mythological "river of pain" across which souls are ferried to the underworld. Two of these souls, each of whom has died suddenly and unexpectedly, are seated at, or, in the case of one of them, sprawled across the bar among the living mourners. The conversations that unfold around them tell of shock, pain, fear, and longing over the deaths, as well as other stories of loneliness and failed relationships.

Fortunately, not all is unrelentingly bleak. There are touches of humor, foolishness, self-indulgence, bar gossip, and karaoke singing to mitigate the core of sadness. The production is also blessed with a pitch perfect cast that includes the members of Five On A Match, along with another half dozen performers, almost all of whom are experienced Equity actors. They have done an excellent job of developing their characters out of the raw material of Twitter, Facebook, and other messaging sites, so that we are able to differentiate among them and follow their separate story lines through the evening. 

Everything about the production works because everything has been carefully planned, down to the monogramed matchbooks, flowers, and candles on the café tables, along with the physical movement of the cast members across the stage, the selection of the karaoke numbers and appropriately non-professional singing, as well as Oana Botez's costumes, Ray Sun Ruey-Horng's video projections, and Christopher Heilman's set design. All told,Seen / By Everyone decidedly rises above its non-linear performance roots to tell an emotionally honest and compelling story that sticks in the mind long after viewing it. 

Theatre Review by Howard Miller - June 7, 2016

Workshop and Ars Nova Reading

How do we to survive family trauma? This documentary verbatim theatre piece explores one family that has had more than its fair share: addiction, rape, neglect, and 12 year old boys getting shot in the head.

Through a very collaborative process creator/director Aubrey Snowden worked with Leah Anderson, Amanda Dolan, Megan Gaffney, Brough Hanson, Judy Molnar, Annie Worden, and Jens Rasmussen to disassemble and reassemble the piece and explore the narrative structure.

The result of those 4 days of work was then presented in public reading at Ars Nova.

New Chapter - Bechdel Project Founding Artist

Having been involved with the creation of many new programs and ventures over the years, few have excited me as much as BECHDEL PROJECT.

This non-profit company is dedicated to telling stories on stage and screen that pass the Bechdel Test.

If you are unfamiliar, there are three criteria to the Bechdel test:

1. The story must have at least 2 women.
2. Who talk to each other.
3. About something besides a man.

Unfortunately a large percentage of the stories produced today do not meet these simple criteria. In other words, little has changed since Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own:  “fictitious women, are too simple — contrary to the living, breathing, complex women of real life, (they) are almost always depicted only in their relation to men.”

Chimamanda Adichie describes well what she calls "The danger of a single story," a fiction that can warp the way we see the world, and our place in it. The Bechdel Project believes it can play a pivotal role in changing the conversation by advocating for and creating new works that tell stories of multi-faceted women that are not just ‘in relation to men.’

This mission is not only good for our society - it is good for our business. We know that women make up a solid majority of theatre and film audiences, so it shouldn’t be surprising that research has found that stories passing the Bechdel test do significantly better at the box office.

Bechdel Project is a marriage of art and activism, education and economics. We hope you'll join us. In fact, we're throwing a party so you can!

BECHDEL PROJECT Rooftop Launch Party! 
October 3rd! Limited Space - get tickets today!

$15 Admission ($20 at door) includes:

• Complimentary Signature Drinks courtesy of NY Distilling Co
• Complimentary Hors d'oeurves
• Prizes: Jewelry by Saskia de Vries Designs, T-shirts, Adventures, More!
• Spectacular Skyline Views
• Live Music by Ben Clark

We look forward to celebrating this new beginning with you and more of NYC's best artists and creators!

GET YOUR TICKETS NOW!