The
Playground
Verse
plays in a cabaret setting!
Inverse Theater & Verse Theater Manhattan
at the Bowery Poetry Club.
New York’s
leading verse performance companies team up at the world-famous downtown
arts venue to produce a year-long schedule of fine verse dramas in
one-night-only presentations
Inverse Theater and Verse Theater Manhattan, having pooled their decade
of combined experience bringing verse drama to downtown audiences,
are pleased to announce the first season of The PlayGround, a series
of contemporary verse plays in a cabaret setting. The PlayGround will
feature some of the finest Off-Broadway and alternative actors in
New York.
Stay tuned for upcoming readings.
Archive:
Monday, November 10th - Agamemnon
"Something begins to smell in this vile house."
So begins Steven Berkoff's adaptation of Aeschylus' AGAMEMNON,
a stark re-imagining of the fall of the house of Atreus. The story
of King Agamemnon's triumphant return from Troy home and his slaughter
by his wife, Clytemnestra, summons up the contagious horror of war.
Monday, November 10th, 7:30 – 9:30 pm
Bowery Poetry Club, at 308 Bowery (off Bleeker).
$5 admission
- Monday December 8th, 7:30pm-9:30pm
Midnight Brainwash Revival by Kirk
Wood Bromley (Inverse Theater producing) MBR is an apocalyptic
verse comedy set in Moab, Utah, as an evil developer threatens
to turn the city into a toxic waste dump. Inverse presents
its annual holiday revel complete with life size puppets and
a spaghetti western score by the late composer, Jessica Grace
Wing.
- Monday January 12th, 7-30pm-9:30pm
Kenneth Koch One Acts: Strangers from the Sea
A a band of sea-faring oxen conquers Sweden, with hilarious
results; The Gold Standard -- two Buddhist monks try to fathom
the convoluted world of currency valuation; and selections
from One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, which riff on, among
other things, Hamlet, Wittgenstein, Cezanne and a man dressed
as a shark.
- Monday, Feburary 9th, 7-30pm-9:30pm
La Mandragola by Machiavelli
A 500-year old verse sex comedy, “La Mandragola”
is Machiavelli's "The Prince" transposed to the
bedroom. Using his insights into manipulative human behavior
and the power games that people play, Machiavelli examines
how these qualities enter into the male/female relations,
and concludes: Seduction is a contest of strategy. (Inverse
producing.)
- Monday March 8th, 7-30pm-9:30pm
In VKTMS, beat poet Michael McClure
(VTM producing) creates a eerie mythic underworld peopled
by the victims of the Oresteia. Still in a state of shock
after their butchering of Helen, her child and the rest of
her household, Orestes and Elektra relive the violence of
their childhood as they are slowly transformed by the gods
into war chariots. A powerful meditation on the human capacity
for blood lust.
- Monday April 12th, 7-30pm-9:30pm: Airedales
and Cipher by Karl Kirchwey (Inverse Theater
producing)
From the author of four widely praised poetry collections,
this verse play received the 1997 Paris Review Prize for Poetic
Drama. Based on Alcestis of Euripedes, Airedales and Cipher
straddles mythology, history and the colloquial present.
- Monday May 10th, 7-30pm-9:30
The Psychiatrist at the Cocktail Party
by Frederick Feirstein (VTM producing) A caustic, witty treatment
of the foibles and follies of a group of party-going New Yorkers.
The first in VTM’s new series of performances spotlighting
the work of Jewish American poets on the stage.
- Monday, June 14th, 7-30pm-9:30
First Annual Verse Play Contest Winner
To cap off their first season of poetry-in-performance at
the Bowery Poetry Club, Inverse and VTM present the winner
of their 2004 verse drama award (contest details available
at www. inversetheater.org and www.versetheatermanhattan.com).
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Past Playgrounds
July 22nd: Transformations by Sheila Daniels, adapted from
the work of Anne Sexton
July 27th: Life's Losses Loved, by Kirk Wood Bromley in Oneonta,
New York
July 29th: Midnight Brainwash Revival, by Kirk Wood Bromley,
in New York City
June, 2002 -- As You Like It, Shakespeare
May, 2002 -- Standish & Priscilla, Scott McCrae
February, 2002 -- Corny, by Robert Simonson
Contact Us
the artistic director: Kirk Bromley
Our mailing address (not theater)
Inverse Theater
c/o Kirk Bromley
506 7TH ST #2
Brooklyn, NY 11215-3613
Copyright 1998-2004
Inverse Theater Company.
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