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What's happening at New Worlds:
Director Paul Takacs joins New Worlds to direct our Fall 2013 production of Hirshbein's CARCASS
Ben Brantley of the New York Times had this to say of Paul's work: "TENDER NAPALM,' which was first staged in London last year and is expertly directed here by Paul Takacs, belongs to the modern tradition of elemental battle-of-the-sexes plays, which reaches back to Strindberg and runs through Pinter and Albee... As led by Mr. Takacs and the movement director Yasmine Lee, Mr. Ellis and Ms. Workman, as in tune to each other’s physicality as a pair of acrobats, put in a decathlon’s worth of kinetic energy"
- The New York Times, August 29, 2012
Paul is the founding Artistic Director of The Shop and most recently directed the U.S. premiere of Philip Ridley's Tender Napalm at 59E59 Theaters. His work has been seen at NYU; The Samuel French New Play Festival; The Red Room, NYC; The Cell Theatre, NYC; The New School for Drama, NYC; Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC; The Theatre Alliance, DC; Spooky Action Theatre, DC; Washington Shakespeare Company, DC; and Theatre of the First Amendment, VA. He has worked on new plays with John Strand, Heather Lynn MacDonald, and Judith Goudsmit to name but a few. He holds a BA in Drama from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and an MFA in Directing from the New School for Drama. He has taught at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and has served as a teaching artist for Shakespeare Theatre Company as well as the Folger Shakespeare Library and is currently on faculty at the Stella Adler Studio in New York.www.paultakacsdirector.com
And we're hard at work with our Playwright-in-Residence, Clarence Coo
Clarence joined New Worlds Theatre Project to adapt Dovid Pinski's PROFESSOR BRENNER. He has been working with us since our residency at the Yiddish Book Center in August 2012, and will continue as we bring Pinski's exciting play to production.
Clarence Coo received the 2012 Yale Drama Series Prize for Emerging Playwrights, which was judged by John Guare, for Beautiful Province (Belle Province). The play was developed at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the Inkwell. His other plays have been produced or developed at Second Generation, the New York International Fringe Festival, Mu Performing Arts, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, Round House Theatre, East West Players, the Mark Taper Forum, the Young Playwrights Festival, and the Kennedy Center. His work has been published by Temple University Press, the New Press, and Samuel French. Honors include an Arena Stage Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship, an NEA Access to Artistic Excellence Grant, a Kennedy Center commission, and a Larry Neal Writers’ Award. He has been a dramaturg at Young Playwrights Inc., a visiting artist at Georgetown University, and a social media writer for the 2010 and 2011 Tony Awards. He received his MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University where he studied under Charles Mee. He is currently a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, a 2012-2013 Dramatists Guild fellow, and the program administrator of Columbia’s MFA Writing Program.
New Worlds Theatre Project's residency at the Yiddish Book Center was a huge success!
August 9 - 12, 2012
From August 9th to the 12th, we were in residence at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, hard at work on Dovid Pinski's PROFESSOR BRENNER. Producing Artistic Director Ellen Perecman and Associate Producing Director Stephen Fried worked with actors Alice Cannon* (James Joyce's The Dead and Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, for NWTP: Welcome to America, With the Current), Jessica DiSalvo* (The Princess of Riverside Drive for Vital Theatre Co., for NWTP: Welcome to America), Dathan Williams* (Show Boat on Broadway, Ragtime National Tour, for NWTP: Welcome to America) and Derek Wilson* (Henry IV, Part 1, No Man's Land, and others for Shakespeare Theatre of NJ, for NWTP: With the Current at the YBC, Professor Brenner reading), developing Pinski's play towards future production.
Dathan Williams
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Derek Wilson
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Dathan Williams
and Alice Cannon
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Jessica DiSalvo
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Praise for WELCOME TO AMERICA:
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"Welcome to America, translated and adapted from the original by company founder Ellen Perecman, warrants a look as an immigrant story that doesn't shy away from the contradictions inherent in its subject. Stories of generational conflict and assimilation can approach cliché, but Welcome to America stands apart because of its willingness to embrace the ambiguity and irresolution that mark the Mazes' status in New York. As Mordechai, Donald Warfield has mastered the mix of the comic tragedian. His deadpans are hilariously cutting, but in Mordechai's speech to co-worker and labor organizer Elye (Alvin Keith, whose calm, focused presence is an ideal foil for Warfield), his bleak resignation is heartrending: "A remnant's place is with other remnants…. First it gets shorn from something bigger, and then it gets discarded." - Backstage
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"In the notes to the play, director Stephen Fried charts its artistic lineage from Leivick’s original script to the work of Clifford Odets and later to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. With this production it’s a fair connection to make. Artistic Director Ellen Perecman’s translation and adaptation highlights the painful shuffle of traditional hierarchies that inevitably follow the entry into American style capitalism. The production is tightly paced and features some excellent performances, especially from Alice Cannon and Donald Warfield as matriarch and patriarch Rokhl-Leye and Mordechai Maze. What is left for a man from whom America has taken as much as it has given? Mordechai’s work as a collector of scraps and rags is more than a plot point — it gives the drama poetic heft and reminds us why Leivick is still considered one of our finest American Yiddish writers." - The Jewish Daily Forward
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New Worlds reading of Dovid Pinski's Professor Brenner, October 27, 2011
On October 27, 2011, New Worlds Theatre Project read Dovid Pinski's 1911 play, PROFESSOR BRENNER, for an audience at the Brotherhood Synagogue in New York City. Actors Brian Cade, Gian-Murray Gianino, Jorge Humberto Hoyos, Peter Francis James, Deanne Lorette, Melissa Miller, Philip Mutz, Sarah Schenkkan, Elaine Stritch, Derek Wilson, director Stephen Fried, and translator/adaptor Ellen Perecman brought Pinski's story of a neurotic art professor madly in love with a woman less than half his age to life. Also in attendance was the playwright's own grandson, Gabriel Pinski, who joined the company for a talk-back following the reading.
New Worlds' residency at the Yiddish Book Center, August 11 - 14, 2011
From August 11 - 14, New Worlds Theatre Project was in residency at the Yiddish Book Center on the beautiful grounds of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Actors Anna Kull, Allan Leicht, Yelena Shmulenson, and Derek Wilson, along with director Stephen Fried and translator/adaptor and New Worlds Producing Artistic Director Ellen Perecman spent four days working on Sholem Asch's WITH THE CURRENT [1907]. We held an open rehearsal, reading, and talk-back, and thrilled our wonderful audience with Asch's potently moving play.
