THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE
Polonsky Shakespeare Center
Jeffrey Horowitz FOUNDING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Robert E. Buckholz BOARD CHAIR
Present a World Premiere
Dorothy Ryan MANAGING DIRECTOR
PROSPEROUS FOOLS
by
TAYLOR MAC
directed by DARKO
TRESNJAK
On the Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage
Featuring
SIERRA BOGGESS, KALISWA BREWSTER, AERINA PARK DEBOER, MEGUMI IWAMA, TAYLOR MAC, JASON O'CONNELL, IAN JOSEPH PAGET, JENNIFER REGAN, CARA SEYMOUR, JENNIFER SMITH, EM STOCKWELL
Musicians
UDI GERSHUNI, RONEN ITZIK, TAYA RICKER
Choreographer AUSTIN MCCORMICK
Scenic Designer ALEXANDER DODGE
Costume Designer ANITA YAVICH
Fight and Intimacy Choreographer ROCÍO MENDEZ
Production Dramaturg JONATHAN KALB
Music ORAN ELDOR
Lighting Designer MATTHEW RICHARDS
Voice Director ANDREW WADE
Production Stage Manager SHANE SCHNETZLER
Hair & Wig Designer TOM WATSON
Casting JACK DOULIN
Sound Designer JANE SHAW
Makeup Designer SARAH CIMINO
Press Representative BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES
First preview June 1, 2025 | Opening night June 12, 2025
Projection equipment provided by 4Wall Entertainment—Michael Lord, Project Manager
Special support for this production is provided by The Roy Cockrum Foundation
Deloitte and Bloomberg Philanthropies are Theatre for a New Audience’s 2024-2025 Season Sponsors.
Projections Designer AARON RHYNE
Properties Supervisor JON KNUST
General Manager CHLOE KNIGHT
Principal support for Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs is provided by the Bay and Paul Foundations, Alan Beller and Stephanie Neville, The Jerome and Marlène Brody Foundation, Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine, The Hearst Foundations, The Howard Gilman Foundation, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund at the New York Community Trust, The Polonsky Foundation, The SHS Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and The Thompson Family Foundation. Major season support is provided by Sally Brody, Constance Christensen, The Hearst Corporation, The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, The Starry Night Fund, Steiner Studios, Stockel Family Foundation, Anne and William Tatlock, The Tow Foundation, Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein, and The White Cedar Fund.
Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs are also made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest;; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Open captioning is provided, in part, by a grant from NYSCA/TDF TAP Plus.
CAST
(in alphabetical order)
####-###...................................................................................................................................................SIERRA BOGGESS Intern...................................................................................................................................................KALISWA BREWSTER
Pot-Bellied Child............................................................................................................................ AERINA PARK DEBOER
Muse #2......................................................................................................................................................MEGUMI IWAMA
Artist.................................................................................................................................................................TAYLOR MAC
$#@%$..................................................................................................................................................JASON O'CONNELL
Prometheus.............................................................................................................................................IAN JOSEPH PAGET
Philanthropoid..........................................................................................................................................JENNIFER REGAN
Muse #3.......................................................................................................................................................CARA SEYMOUR
Stage Manager............................................................................................................................................JENNIFER SMITH
Muse #1......................................................................................................................................................EM STOCKWELL
Conductor/Keyboard.....................................................................................................................................UDI GERSHUNI
Percussion........................................................................................................................................................RONEN ITZIK
Violin................................................................................................................................................................TAYA RICKER
Production Stage Manager...................................................................................................................SHANE SCHNETZLER
Assistant Stage Manager..............................................................................................................................SAMMY LANDAU
Fight Captain.........................................................................................................................................IAN JOSEPH PAGET
Dance Captain.............................................................................................................................................CARA SEYMOUR
Running Time: Approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes plus one 15-minute intermission.
Written by and starring Taylor Mac, Prosperous Fools , loosely inspired by Moliere’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme , is a brilliant and courageous exploration of philanthropy and its hypocrisies, a retooled comedy of manners for an age with no manners. The setting is a gala for a not-for-profit dance company. The time is the present.
This production includes haze and flashing lights and adult language and sexually explicit action.
This Theatre operates under an agreement between the League of Resident Theatres and Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
The stage managers employed in this production are members of Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States.
The scenic, costume, lighting, and sound designers in LORT Theatres are represented by United Scenic Artists, Local USA-829 of the IATSE.
The Director is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, Inc., an independent national labor union.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
5 Interview: "Reality Got in the Way"
Alisa Solomon in conversation with Taylor Mac
10 Dialogues: "The Early Performances of Taylor Mac" from The Taylor Mac Book by Sean Edgecomb
19 Bios: Cast and Creative Team
25 About Theatre For a New Audience
Notes
Front Cover: Design by Paul Davis Studio / Paige Restaino.
This Viewfinder will be periodically updated with additional information. Last updated June 23, 2025.
Credits
Prosperous Fools 360° | Edited by Zoe Donovan
Resident Dramaturg: Jonathan Kalb | Council of Scholars Chair: Tanya Pollard | Designed by: Milton Glaser, Inc.
Publisher: Theatre for a New Audience, Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director
Prosperous Fools 360° Copyright 2025 by Theatre for a New Audience. All rights reserve d.
With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Viewfinder may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electr onic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials herein are written especially for our guide. Others are reprinted with permission of their authors or publishers.
The company of Prosperous Fools. Back row (left to right): Cara Seymour, Megumi Iwama, Em Stockwell, Taylor Mac, Ian Joseph Paget, Jason O'Connell. Front row: Sierra Boggess, Jennifer Regan, Kaliswa Brewster, Jennifer Smith. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
INTERVIEW “REALITY GOT IN THE WAY”
ALISA SOLOMON IN CONVERSATION WITH TAYLOR MAC
The following is an edited version of a conversation that took place on May 22, 2025 between Alisa Solomon (TFANA Council of Scholars) and Prosperous Fools playwright and actor Taylor Mac.
ALISA SOLOMON Taylor, you have worked in a number of theatrical genres with a wide range of literary and philosophical references and in that respect, Prosperous Fools is no exception. It has Greek mythology, classical ballet, echoes of Molière, commedia dell’arte, Brecht, Wally Shawn, even the demonstration of a catalogue of comic styles. But it is different from your other work, too, insofar as it feels, at least to me, more anguished— though still hilarious and pleasurably silly, too.
TAYLOR MAC It's Juvenalian satire when dealing with the oligarchic patron in the play. So pretty biting. It's aggressive in its attacks. But the play has two patrons, and the other, the humanitarian superstar, is treated with Horatian satire. So, kindness and folly play side by side with the attacks. And all for the purpose of a better
world! The composer/choreographer that I play wants to create a commedia ballet about Prometheus, but the world gets in the way. So the play itself is longing to be just a funny ballet that lifts everybody's spirits and informs them a little bit about philanthropy and mythology, and it wants to be light and artistic and beautiful, and my character wants beautiful lines from his dancers, but the reality gets in the way.
ALISA And that reality has to do with how art is funded and how those who fund it come into their wealth. We see a critique of this reality emerge through the occasion of the play’s action: a fundraising gala for the theater where your character, the Artist, is trying to present his ballet. You must've been to a ton of fundraising galas for theaters over the years.
TAYLOR I just did four of them.
ALISA Four!!?
TAYLOR It was gala season!
Megumi Iwama as Muse #2, Ian Joseph Paget as Prometheus, Taylor Mac as Artist, Em Stockwell as Muse #1, Cara Seymour as Muse #3. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
“REALITY GOT IN THE WAY” ALISA SOLOMON
ALISA What did you have to do?
TAYLOR Well, one of 'em I was being honored at. So what I said at that gala was: Now I've played all the parts in this room because I was a cater-waiter for many galas when I first moved to the city. I've been the guest at a table. I've been the artist that is being asked to donate their services as talent. I've been a donor. And now I've been honored. So I've played all the parts except for maybe the gala organizer, which I never will do. That's where I draw the line.
ALISA The play must be drawing from some of those experiences.
TAYLOR Oh, yeah. For sure.
ALISA What happened?
TAYLOR The Oligarch’s speech in the play about “momentum equaling success” and “giving towards success,” and “you can never fail” and “how do you make a non-for-profit run like a business?” All of that is stuff I've heard at galas multiple times over the years. It is a general opinion of board members and the
people honored at galas that non-for-profits should work more like businesses.
I greatly needed to exorcize that from my consciousness by putting it in a play because I couldn't disagree with it more. And yet, these ideas are often given this platform. None of the critique in the play is stuff I’ve made up. It’s all coming from listening to the community (artists, artistic directors, technicians, cater-waiters, and even board members and donors) complain quietly, instead of publicly. I’m just making it public, without literally naming names. My hope is that every board member in New York City comes to see this play. Because I think what they don't know is we all whisper to each other how awful they are. And I know they want to do good, and I know some of them are doing good, but there needs to be more communication between the artists and the boards, between the people on the ground and the people who are hoarding all the money. The assumption is that philanthropy is moral. And what I'm questioning—in a country that was built on the concept “of the people, for the people, by the people”—is a feudal system of philanthropy, actually.
Sierra Boggess as ####-###, Jason O’Connell as $#@%$. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
“REALITY GOT IN THE WAY” ALISA SOLOMON
So, I don't know how to solve that problem, but I think board members should be talking more about how the government needs to pay for our culture. These people have power and need to be talking more about how the government needs to pay, the people collectively need to pay, for culture instead of trying to make culture part of the private sector.
ALISA How do you handle these situations? Do you just stand around at galas and smile while cringing inwardly?
TAYLOR I went to one where they were honoring someone who was, to me—what they stand for—is the reason why there are problems in the American theater. And we just all had to sit there as if, Wow, isn't this wonderful? And you're kind of going, No! But I don't want to screw it up for the theater that is getting all their money for the entire year, and all the artists that are going to be paid as a result. And so part of me is thinking, What's the more moral choice? To shame somebody publicly and say, No, we shouldn't do it this way. Or to grin and bear it, or to go and write a play about it?
ALISA Let’s get more specific about this play, then. How did it come about?
TAYLOR I was invited to do an adaptation of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme [Molière’s comédie-ballet that satirizes social climbing and greed as a fatuous middle-class man tries to become an aristocrat]. I said I wouldn’t do that but would write a play inspired by Molière’s. I wrote it, but the theater that commissioned me decided not to do it. I couldn't get a straight answer from anyone if they'd actually even read the play. And then I had this play for 40 ballet dancers and who was going to do that ? It took me a little while to adapt it so that theater companies could actually do it financially. And then it took me 12 years to get it produced because it's critical of donors. I went to every theater in New York City, and they all said no, except for TFANA.
ALISA Twelve years ago!? It seems so of the moment. The line about forcing beggars to compete with each other seems like it came right out of news about a Trump administration proposal for a reality show in which migrants would compete for citizenship.
TAYLOR It’s the same exact thing. I wrote that line because I'd seen “RuPaul's Drag Race,” and though I’ve never actually seen an episode of “The Apprentice,” I know the concept of it, and I've seen clips of it. And what
are those shows? They are poor people competing for who can be the best beggar. So I guess this is my way of saying everything that's happening right now was happening 12 years ago. It is just so much more apparent now.
ALISA To make this critique, do you have to bite the hand that feeds you?
TAYLOR I don't mind critiquing the power system that's in the room. I try to do it with humor so that everyone can laugh at themselves and the world and then get to the deep place. But who knows if that actually is possible. It's virtuous to win in our culture. So we're not allowed to critique those who have won at money and real estate, and here we are with this billionaire real estate mogul in charge of our lives and our culture. What I always say in my drag shows is, I don't like to bite the hand that feeds me. But I do like to get a little lipstick on it.
ALISA As one of our preeminent drag artists, why do you think drag became such a useful campaign issue on the right?
TAYLOR They lost the gay debate. Not that I care about gays in the military, but we got the gays in the military; not that I care about marriage, but we got gay marriage: Gays became incorporated into capitalism. The vast majority of Americans are fine with homosexuals, so they had to attack something else. And it was trans people. And drag queens are—to the people who look at them ignorantly—a kind of bridge between gay people and trans people.
ALISA But what's so scary about trans? Why does it work politically to run an ad that says Kamala Harris is for they/them and Trump is for you?
TAYLOR I think people are really afraid of what I would describe as a midlife change. Men get more estrogen in their bodies, and women get more testosterone just naturally. So we all move to gender queerness. Old guys start to take on feminine features as they get older and older. It’s a big sign of death. And people are terrified of death. They see gender ambiguity and transness as something that is inevitable to them. My favorite Tiffany Haddish line is that men are just women whose pussies fell out because the eggs are the testicles, and that if you really look at the genitalia, it just was all up there, and then it fell down. So we're all the same. And they don't want it to be that way. They're afraid of the natural world. So the cis people trying to avoid becoming genderqueer as they
“REALITY GOT IN THE WAY” ALISA SOLOMON
age are getting liposuction, and they're getting their hair implants. They're taking all their estrogen and their testosterone, and they're just afraid to freaking die, and they blame trans people for death.
ALISA Wow.
TAYLOR That's what I think. But you're not going to find anyone else who's going to say that. But you have that much money, and you start wanting to purchase eternal life.
ALISA Coming back to the play, let’s talk about Wally Shawn. He’s represented in Prosperous Fools as a hilarious costume-puppet. In real life he exemplifies a lot of what the play is addressing insofar as he's known for playing silly, lovable characters in movies, but his actual work as a writer—and his activism—involves sharp, provocative critiques. Like his one-person play The Fever , in which the protagonist, a person of privilege, confronts how that comfort requires, if only indirectly, the persecution and suffering of others.
TAYLOR Or Aunt Dan and Lemon.
ALISA Yes. Which engages the audience in the alarming experience of coming to appreciate a fascist.
TAYLOR A full-on tragedy.
ALISA Do you know him?
TAYLOR We shared a green room together for a few months when we both were preforming at The Public and I just fell in love with him as a human being. I was already in love with him as an artist. I gave him the play because I wanted to make sure he was okay with it and that he understood the spirit of it. And I told him, I can rewrite it and change it. And he said, Absolutely, you don't have to ask me. He wrote me a really, really sweet note. We have his blessing. He’s game for the world to ask questions and to do it in theatrical form.
ALISA He's so forthright politically, which comes out in the second act, when he has a kind of explosion,
TAYLOR Through the Artist character. That's the dramatic event of the play: The Artist finally says, I'm not going to keep all this hidden. I'm going to actually confront it. But the Artist needs to use the robe of Wally Shawn, in order to get there.
ALISA In the Wally Shawn guise, he demands to know
why we should thank the wealthy “for giving away what shouldn't be theirs to begin with.” It's interesting that theaters don’t generally come under the same kind of activist scrutiny as art museums over these issues. Remember the demonstrations against the Whitney a few years ago over a member of their board of trustees whose company produced the tear gas that was allegedly being used against migrants at the Mexican border? Or the movement against the Sacklers and oxy?
TAYLOR Museums have been just horrible. But they also get millions and millions and millions of more dollars than the theater does. That’s partially why. We're grungy little kids, even the richest of our institutions.
ALISA Which are all getting a little poorer now that the National Endowment for the Arts is revoking and stopping grants.
TAYLOR We had money taken away from our production along with so many organizations.
ALISA Is somebody making up the difference?
TAYLOR I don't know. Maybe somebody stepped up, somebody with money who we're thankful for, and then, do we need to honor them?
ALISA Right. Did they make their money by teargassing children?
TAYLOR Or from pharmaceutical heroin?
ALISA So, what are the options? The NEA is pretty much finished, not that it's ever been more than a pittance.
TAYLOR Yeah, it was a pittance to begin with. That is why I wrote the play 12 years ago, because I thought everyone had given up on the NEA. I would go to meetings, and everyone would be asking, What's the best way for the Mellon Foundation to give money to us? And I'd say, What are you talking about? It should be of the people, for the people, by the people. Why are we critiquing the Mellon Foundation? We should be making change in the government. But it's too hard because the American people don't want art. They don't want culture. They want culture to be something that you purchase.
ALISA And they have been convinced that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes.
“REALITY GOT IN THE WAY” ALISA SOLOMON
TAYLOR But I think it's bullshit that Americans don't want taxes. It's how we have communicated what taxes are. Because taxes are just a giant Groupon. You get so much more for so much less. We pool our resources together. If you had to pay for the street yourself or pay every time you rode on that street, then it would cost you a whole lot more than your taxes. We've just allowed the narrative to be that taxes are a punishment instead of a great benefit.
ALISA So what's going to happen? How do you think shows are going to afford to go on in the future? We might not even have nonprofits anymore.
TAYLOR We're going to figure it out. The problem is we all get put into detention centers with no habeas corpus, that's the real issue. The issue isn't whether theater will continue or not. I mean, it is older than MAGA—although one could argue that Socrates was killed by MAGA people. I heard somebody say the other day that theater artists are our cockroaches—the only beings that would survive a nuclear war. We'll still be here making theater. We'll figure it out.
And I believe in culture, and I believe that if culture was free or super cheap, people would engage with it more, and they would be less afraid of ideas. And I think if it was available for everyone, if the richest country in the world actually saw that culture was important and the people of the country saw that culture was important, then it would be a snowball effect of engagement with culture.
ALISA The idea of the clueless, or worse, malfeasant patron of an arts institution is familiar in pop cultural backstage stories. I’m thinking of that old, great Canadian TV series about a Shakespeare theater, “Slings and Arrows,” or the current Prime series, “Étoile” about ballet companies. But those are almost sweet comic villains. In Prosperous Fools you are pushing the critique so much harder, in part through a style of comic excess. One aspect—I might call it a running gag—is that the Oligarch and Humanitarian don’t have names, but sounds. The Oligarch, for instance, is designated in the script as “$#@!$”. How come?
TAYLOR Because those sounds are what I feel when I think of those people. It just felt like they were sounds, they're symbols. It was my way of just saying, We know this trope. We're dealing with cliches. And then it humanizes everybody as it goes along. At least that's my goal.
ALISA How does it work productively to go over the top? Why is a certain kind of comic excess effective?
TAYLOR I can just speak personally. I'm constantly at these galas censoring myself because I don't want to hurt the theater. I don't want to hurt the feelings of the donor who doesn't understand that they said something that isn't ethically in line with what I believe. Or I don't want to embarrass anyone. So I'm always juggling my moral desire that people be cared for instead of publicly shamed. And I want to treat people the way I want to be treated. So that means you're constantly censoring yourself, thinking cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Hold your breath. Hold your tongue. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. One of the great things about the theater is it's a space where you don't have to do that anymore. And not only do you not have to do it, the floodgate can be let go, and you can shout it to the rafters. You can shout it to Mount Olympus. You can really just express what you have been clamping down on for years. Extreme comedy is a way for you to get out the demons that we all have. And I think that's in some ways more useful than politely stating the argument (though I do that too. It's a yes-and situation.) So, to me, it's cathartic. That's what the theater's built for: catharsis .
ALISA SOLOMON is a teacher, writer and dramaturg living in New York City. She directs the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her criticism, essays, and political reporting have appeared in a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Nation, Jewish Currents, Forward, Theater, and Village Voice (where she was on the staff for 21 years). She is the author of two award-winning books, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. She is (co-)editor of several anthologies, among them: Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (with Tony Kushner; Grove, 2003) and a book of material by and about Robbie McCauley (with Elin Diamond and Cynthia Carr, forthcoming from TCG.)
DIALOGUES "THE EARLY PERFORMANCES OF TAYLOR MAC"
BY SEAN EDGECOMB
Excerpted from The Taylor Mac Book by Sean Edgecomb and David Román. Copyright © 2023 by Sean Edgecomb and David Román. Excerpted by permission of University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved. The Taylor Mac Book is available for purchase at the book kiosk in the Polonsky Shakespeare Center lobby, as well as online .
Taylor Mac’s remarkable oeuvre carries on the tradition of Charles Ludlam, who is identified as the auteur of the Theatre of the Ridiculous genre through his writing, directing, and appearing in twentynine original plays for his Ridiculous Theatrical Company (RTC) between its founding in 1967 and his untimely death in 1987. Ludlam’s Ridiculous aesthetic juxtaposed the modernist tradition of the avant-garde (even though Ludlam rejected the term) with camp, clowning, and drag. Forming within the gay community at the
watershed of gay liberation, it was one of the first fully realized queer theater forms in the United States. More specifically, it mixed high literary culture with low pop culture, generating a pastiche that reflected and satirized contemporary society. Farcical in nature, the Ridiculous contributed to the emergence of the postmodern clown, a comic figure who appropriates traditional clowning skills and "fragments, subverts and inverts” them to create a self-reflexive and deconstructive performance. After solidifying their reputation as an actor in the 1990s, Mac embraced this aesthetic, provocatively adopting and extending Ludlam’s Ridiculous, employing it as a fool for political satire and radical social commentary, by layering Ludlam’s clown (an entertainer combining traditional comic skills with camp) with the alternative persona of the fool (a figure whose comic identity is a reflection of their status as a born outsider).
While other contributors to this collection take up aspects of Mac’s broad oeuvre, this chapter focuses on the period before 2009, the foundational period in Mac’s development as a neo-Ridiculous artist. It treats four works that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: The Face of Liberalism (2002), Red Tide Blooming (2006), the Be(A)st of Taylor Mac (2006), and The Young Ladies of…(2007). It was through these shows that Mac laid the groundwork for their signature fool persona through a personal interpretation of their distinct neo-Ridiculous aesthetic, which evolved from an amateur, queer one-person show in a Manhattan bar to Mac’s more fully developed plays.
In their performances, Mac is consciously haunted by the ghost of the original Ridiculous, but rather than acting as someone possessed, they act as a medium to the spirit, which, in the words of Joseph Roach, allows them to “bring forth, to make manifest, and to transmit. “Roach suggests that the making of culture through the practice of performance is inherently re-inventionist, allowing for a process that is generative and nonbiologically productive. In their contemporary Ridiculous performance, Mac seeks both to resurrect and to transform predecessors such as Ludlam. In this way, their Ridiculous aesthetic exemplifies the operations of queer legacy in David Román’s sense of “provisional collectives” where “certain artists mark themselves as historical subjects whose genealogies might be found outside of traditional systems of identification and belonging” Román elucidates his concept through the notion of “archival drag” which refers to “the nature of contemporary performances that draw on historical re-
"THE EARLY PERFORMANCES OF TAYLOR MAC" SEAN EDGECOMB
embodiment and expertise. When brought into conversation with Elizabeth Freeman’s “temporal drag” which she defines as “a kind of historical jouissance, a friction of dead bodies upon live ones, [and] obsolete constructions upon emergent ones,” drag is extended beyond early utopian notions introduced by Judith Butler and favors particular acts of drag drawn from social histories. If the Ludlamesque legacy is what Mac figuratively drags behind themself as a connection to the past, the acknowledgment of this trailing history allows Mac to cut the ties, creating a momentum that propels them forward into new performative manifestations of the Ridiculous that provide queer commentary on the contemporary United States.
Formative Years
Taylor Mac (Bowyer) (1973-) was born in Laguna Beach, California, and grew up on the West Coast with no access to downtown New York theater until they were an adult. Because of this distance in both location and culture, their approach to performance developed independently until they eventually became part of New York City's queer performance tradition. After graduating from high school in Stockton, California, 1991, Mac moved to San Francisco, “because it was the closet city, and the gayest city,” and the ideal place for them to come out of the closet. San Francisco offered Mac a hodgepodge education that included professional acting training and practical experience as a working actor. Mac moved to New York City in 1994 to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA), where they continued their acting training, studied theater history, and also learned that the AADA had been the training ground for Ethyl Eichelberger (né James Roy Eichelberger,1945-90), who would influence their emerging interest in the Ridiculous aesthetic. A classically trained actor like Ludlam, Eichelberger developed their unique Ridiculous sensibility while working with Ludlam and the RTC. After leaving the company to pursue a career as a solo performer, they migrated from the West Village to the bohemian world of the Lower East Side in the early 1980s (a period now deemed the East Village Renaissance) and became known for their solo draft shows featuring iconic women from history and mythology, including Nefert-iti (1978) Jocasta (1982), and Medusa (1985). Eichelberger was a seminal figure in the post-Stonewall queer theater movement before dying by suicide in 1990, unable to tolerate the harsh side effects of their prescribed AIDS medication.
On graduating from the AADA, Mac performed in regional theater across the United States and began
developing their own ideas as a playwright. Seeking an outlet to express their frustration with the state of US theater, Mac began writing what they call “kooky” plays with traditional dramatic structures, such as The Hot Month (1999), in which the beat of a heart monitor sets the pace and tone of the play as a sister, a brother, and his male lover struggle to find their identities and come to grips with another in the face of death, and The Levee (written in 2000), a kitchen-sink drama about a heterosexual couple attempting to deal with the pain and pressure of repeated miscarriages. In the summer of 2000, Mac headed to the gay resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts, to focus on their newfound vocation as playwright and to experiment with thrift-store drag performances. Because “Ptown” constitutes a living archive of intergenerational activity, particularly among gay men, Mac’s drag appearance on the scene inspired comparisons to Ridiculous founders, including [Jack] Smith, [Ronald] Tavel, [Ethyl] Eichelberger, and [Charles] Ludlam. Such comparisons motivated Mac to immerse themselves in the Ridiculous canon and to learn its history. They discovered that the first manifestation of the Ridiculous took place in 1965 at the Play-House of the Ridiculous (PHR), founded by Tavel as resident troupe playwright and John Vacarro as director. Tavel and Vaccaro formulated the pastiche style of the Ridiculous in early plays such as Shower (1965) and The Life of Juanita (1965), both of which were intended for but rejected by Andy Warhol’s Factory. In 1966, Ludlam, fresh from the drama program at Hofstra University, joined the Play-House of the Ridiculous as an actor and playwright, and his Ridiculous fate was sealed. A year later, he mutinied from Tavel and Vaccaro with a majority of the company members in tow, formed the RTC, and became the key figure in the movement for the next twenty years. Many of the summer residents in Provincetown had firsthand recollections of Ludlam both personally and in performance, providing Mac with an education drawn from memory and experience.
During this summer, Mac also discovered the Ludlamesque interpretation of the clown. Ludlam was notorious for channeling his comic stage personae through a distinctive clown character pastiched from a grand tradition of clown types, including Greek mimes, the auguste, Arlecchino, the scapegoat, and the medieval court jester, and he exemplified in his characters Saint Obnoxious (Turds in Hell, 1968), the Fool (The Grand Tarot, 1969), and Mr. Foufas the farceur (Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde, 1983). Ludlam relied on camp to construct his clown characters, becoming a covert
"THE EARLY PERFORMANCES OF TAYLOR MAC" SEAN EDGECOMB
spokesperson for the gay community that was gaining visibility in New York in the 1970s. His distinct sense of camp as “an outsider's view of things” was employed as a method by which marginalized outsiders (queers) could communicate with like-minded individuals through a series of codes-a secret language. For Ludlam, the concept of camp was thus a combination of the ideas inherent in his plays and the larger-than-life aesthetic choices in his productions.
Ludlam further fashioned his clown through the practice of “genderfuck” drag, which hyperbolizes expressions of artificiality (both aesthetic and gestural) to “fuck” with gender perceptions. A signature feature of Ludlam's stage clowns, this gender-fuck camp aesthetic distinguished his groundbreaking interpretations of Norma Desmond (Big Hotel, 1967), Maria Magdalena Galas (his homage to Maria Callas; Galas, 1983), and Lady Enid (The Mystery of Irma Vep, 1984), as well as his performance in his 1973 adaptation of La Dame aux Camelias by Alexandre Dumas fils. In Ludlam's Camille, the doomed romantic relationship between the courtesan Marguerite Gautier (Ludlam) and her lover Armand Duval, played by RTC member Bill Vehr, respectively, demonstrates how Ludlam strategically mimicked a heteronormative relationship to openly depict a gay romance onstage. Although portrayed by two openly gay men, Marguerite and Armand's relationship was approached with complete sincerity and dedication in an effort to facilitate what Ludlam referred to as “believ[ing] in the character beyond the gender of the actor.” Even though Ludlam proudly displayed his hairy chest and arms in his low-cut, nineteenth-centurystyle gown, he drew the audience into the story enough to forget the intentional artificiality, camp, and anarchic disregard for verisimilitude in the production.
Drawing on Ludlam’s distinct drag aesthetic and understanding of camp, Mac filters the practice of gender-fuck through the figure of the fool, drawing on the color, tone, and infrastructure of the time and place which they live. Scholar Enid Welsford defines the fool as one who is “the mouthpiece of a spirit, or power external to himself, and so has access to hidden knowledge—especially to knowledge of the future.” The fool possesses a seemingly clairvoyant ability to see beyond the imposed boundaries of a society, making him a gauge of the moral underpinnings of a civilized culture. Mac’s version of the fool lies closest to what Louis Pétit de Julleville refers to as “la jeunesse
abandonée á la nature,” the fool who is cast out by the civilized into the wilds, where they adapt to and eventually rule their surroundings. In the first phase of Mac’s career (analyzed herein), they originally represented the gay youth rejected by a normative culture and given up to the wilds of New York City, where they find respite from homophobia through opportunities to form community. In this context, Mac as fool found the opportunity to establish their own fool society, inviting audiences into their own queer space rather than entertaining the mainstream. As Mac’s career and notoriety have grown, however, their current works expand the notion of community, working toward inclusion and representation of anyone willing to work for social justice in the United States. This is particularly evident in the ongoing A 24-Decade
Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly:The Essays and Opinions of Charles Ludlam , edited by Steven Samuels. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992.
"THE EARLY PERFORMANCES OF TAYLOR MAC" SEAN EDGECOMB
History of Popular Music , which attempts to resurrect lost narratives of all marginalized or oppressed Americans over the past 240 years.
After fashioning an early version of their gender-fuck fool character (“a Pierrot figure for the modern age,” and a “stage-worthy representation of [them]self”) following Mac’s Provincetown sojourn, Mac began doing short performances at NYC gay bars, including the Marquis and the Slide. Performing brief comic vignettes, they began to gain some celebrity among the subcultural coteries of downtown Manhattan. This early-career approach to performance in a variety of found spaces reflected Ludlam’s origins, when he and the Play-House of the Ridiculous performed Turds in Hell in a porno cinema on 42nd Street and the RTC presented Bluebeard (1970) on reclaimed boards laid precariously across the bar at the West Village watering-hole Christopher’s End.
Describing their stylistic approach as “Hey, let’s put on a show!,” Mac took up the tradition of the “moldy aesthetic” introduced by Jack Smith, an approach that creates art from the discarded refuse of others, often coating it in glitter. In his 1962 essay, “the Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,” Smith states that “trash is the material of creators.” The communal freedom and opportunity for improvisatory creation or destruction implied by Smith's eccentric vision was communicated directly through his underground films Flaming Creatures (1962-63) and Normal Love (1963) and his play Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis (1965). Smith's work was irrefutably political in its attack on American capitalism, which was couched in metaphors such as his use of a Lobster to represent the “epitome of the avaricious landlord [ ... ] who increasingly held the world in his grip.” The theme of material and social refuse became emblematic of the era, with queer works such as John Waters’s Mondo Trasho (1969) and Andy Warhol’s Trash (1970). Ludlam continued this adoration of the disposed-of by rifling through trash to compose his distinct plays and performances.
Following in this tradition, Mac began to create new art thematically born from the destruction and refuse of the 9/11 terrorist attack in the same way that their predecessors had created work from their own beloved trash heaps. Mac's early drag aesthetic was “glamorously beaten" in style, with smeared makeup and layers of violently ripped garments. A mélange of enlightened precision and premeditated disarray, Mac’s drag became the omnipresent
metaphor steering their artistic practice, their at-odds aesthetic serving as a visual allegory for the political themes on which their work is based. For example, in early performances a homemade dress of dirty latex gloves was a metaphor for “the War on Terror,” the filthy, cheap, and intentionally haphazard garment physically representing what Mac calls the “mess” in the Middle East. Mac’s image thus reflected their frustration with the state of the wardriven, jingoistic American political climate post-9/11.
Although Mac had lived in the East Village for several years, the period directly following 9/11 was their first opportunity to perform in the unconventionally laissez-faire climate of downtown Manhattan, where the theater scene provided room for experimentation and failure that enabled them to thrive. As Mac has explained, “Uptown, failure is unacceptable but suddenly downtown I found this access to a world that was just embracing of performance, and of difference, and of being in the moment, and kookiness and failure. [Downtown] they'll clap for you if you fail.” These foundational ideas would lead to Mac's ongoing, often-repeated mantra: “perfection is for assholes.” Mac’s reflections on the power of failure resonate with J. Jack Halberstam's view that in a queer context, failure may “offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.”
The Face of Liberalism (2002)
Following out of these formative years, Mac turned to political performance, motivated by the goal of revealing what they consider to be “the end of the American empire.” Their solo show The Face of Liberalism was prompted by the White House's response to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In developing the show, Mac began to evolve their signature fool persona as an extension of themself, a social commentator who reveals truth, bravely speaking against dominant sociopolitical beliefs, in this case the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. Mac’s fool is a hybrid of traditional fool archetypes; as an artist, they are an artificial fool who uses slick wit to comment and entertain the audience, but Mac also takes on the role of the natural fool, a figure shunned as an outsider and ostracized as a self-identifying queer. When in this fool mode, Mac refers to themself as “a bedazzled creature [who] builds community. Mac’s ideal vision of this community is as a magnanimous collective composed of self-identifying queer activists and their allies. Mac extends this even further in more contemporary, participatory works, including The Lily's Revenge, A 24-Decade History, and Holiday Sauce.
"THE EARLY PERFORMANCES OF TAYLOR MAC" SEAN EDGECOMB
Premiering in 2002 (though a longer run would follow in 2003) in the basement of the Slide Bar on the Bowery in New York’s East Village, The Face of Liberalism was among the very first theater pieces to interrogate and satirize the climate of fear and resultant xenophobia that Mac suggests came from the Bush White House following 9/11. Reinventing the Ridiculous genre as “in-yer-face” Americana, Mac succeeded in this work in morphing Ludlam’s midcentury gay theater into a more socially conscious version, while preserving the extremist and histrionic nature of the original. Just as Ludlam’s Ridiculous had thrived on the creation of exclusive safe space as a site for politically unrestrained expression, The Face of Liberalism invited participants into an alternate world, where Mac played the role of a postmodern Lord of Misrule. Describing the show as “a subversive jukebox musical,” Mac relied on the preferred Ridiculous practice of pastiche to formulate the highly politicized work. Advertised as “a mishmash of original songs, parodies, stories and mental illness,” the show was based around a set list that included “War Criminal Romp,” a New Orleans-style jazz tune in which the lyrics are a recitation of the names of supporters of the Bush administration, and “Fear Itself,” a thoughtful ballad that Mac sang without accompaniment, pointedly closing the show with the lyrics: “I’m afraid of patriotism, and nationalism and jingoism/We’ve nothing to fear but fear itself, fear itself, fear itself.” Although the songs remained mostly the same for each performance (with room for Mac’s now-trademark improvisational commentary), they added transitional topical and anecdotal monologues about the state of US society in the period following 9/11. In one such monologue, Mac explored tackiness through the persona of a disenfranchised teenage Goth: “People are selling baby American flags on the street for two dollars when you know they only cost like two cents and were made by some Taiwanese premi-baby in their makeshift bamboo incubator.”
The Face of Liberalism provided a potential refuge for like-minded audience members who openly criticized the conservative political majority during a time of jingoistic fervor—the period directly following 9/11. Although audiences for the run of the show were admittedly limited, the performance space successfully doubled as a site of refuge and communion for urban Americans who harbored similar feelings of frustration with prevailing hegemonic ideologies that promoted xenophobia and
absolutism. Mac embodied, hyperbolized, and performed the minority position through their carefully constructed image: a voluntary scapegoat,the traditional fool archetype reclaimed as a figurehead with a political agenda. In offering up their cosmeticized visage for consumption, Mac willingly became the unlikely “face” of liberalism. Mac's continuing political stance as a self-proclaimed liberal (though more contemporarily, they might prefer “progressive”) is driven by their belief in a democratic society that supports the expression of individual freedoms across “a range of humanity.” When read in combination, themes discussed in The Face of Liberalism, including blind patriotism and subsequent threats to individualism and representation, offer a subtle critique of neoliberalism and the social detachment that Mac sees as a destructive consequence of its global proliferation.
The Face of Liberalism stands apart from Mac's later works because of its underground origin and nature. Positioned as a piece of provocative antipatriotic art and located surreptitiously in an East Village basement with limited advertising or press, this foundational performance marked the materialization of Mac's fresh take on the Ludlamesque Ridiculous tradition in a postmillennial context.
Red Tide Blooming (2006)
In 2005, Mac was the inaugural winner of the Ethyl Eichelberger Award, a commissioning prize given in recognition of an artist who embodies Eichelberger's uninhibited aesthetic and spirit. As such, Mac was invited to compose, and funded to produce, an original work. In homage to Mac's Ridiculous predecessor, Mac elected to create Red Tide Blooming , a play about disenfranchisement and a search for belonging inspired by the early epic plays of Tavel and Ludlam in the genre of Ridiculous pastiche.
The plot of Red Tide Blooming is based on the gentrification of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, where bohemians dress up in outré costumes as marine creatures, both real and mythological, in a contemporary Feast of Fools. The capital-driven metamorphoses of the former bohemian enclaves of lower Manhattan into now one of the city’s most unaffordable neighborhoods has forced artists to seek new haunts beyond the city proper, among them Coney Island. This migration of New York City’s artists and creatives to the far edge of Brooklyn, along with Coney Island’s colorful past as a nonstop carnival that provided escapist amusement away from the
"THE EARLY PERFORMANCES OF TAYLOR MAC" SEAN EDGECOMB
city, inspired the creation of the Mermaid in 1983. As a celebration for and of self-declared “freaks,” the parade took a cue from the practice of Gay Pride parades (and specifically NYC Pride), the popularity and carnival atmosphere of which led in the 1980s to large marketing campaigns and opportunities for the business-minded to capitalize on and profit from the crowds that gathered. Similarly, as the Mermaid Parade grew in size and popularity, the celebration that had been created as an alternative by and for disenfranchised members of society (both gay and straight) became a magnet for a wider audience.
Red Tide Blooming is a metatheatrical pageant with characters and parade participants presenting a play that seeks to answer the question, What happened to all of the freaks? Mac carefully curated a cast of “outsiders” that included burlesque performers, performance artists, trans activists, drag queens, radical Faeries, a self-proclaimed slut, naked bodies of all shapes and sizes, four generations of performers, all different kinds of celebrated sexual perversions, and even former Play-House of the Ridiculous veteran superstar Ruby Lynn Reyner. In bringing together a variety of wellknown performers from across generations, the cast embodies the legacy of the Ridiculous tradition in a histrionic family reunion. The decision to construct the
play around contemporary stock characters is directly borrowed from Ludlam, who, as a trained expert in commedia dell’arte, frequently built texts around archetypes and situations from the early modern Italian drama. The play would also provide foundational understanding of commedia, which Mac expanded on in their production of A Walk Across America for Mother Earth, which premiered at LaMaMa in collaboration with Talking Band in 2011.
Red Tide Blooming centers around Mac-as-Olokun, a hermaphrodite sea creature who has secured their phallus to their posterior with duct tape—what drag queens refer to as “tucking.” Mac borrowed the name Olokun, an Orisha spirit of the ocean who embodies equally male and female characteristics, from the religion of the Yoruba of West Africa. Appearing onstage on a desert island of discarded toys reminiscent of Smith’s vision of a trash-heap metropolis, Mac-as-Olokun elucidates their desire to find and commune with other freaks like themself: “All freaks? Disappeared? They can’t have disappeared. Maybe they've gotten sad and have hidden away for a time.” Mac’s interpretation of the freak resonated with Michel Foucault's views on insanity and how, as Chris Baldrick has summarized, “the freak must have a purpose: to reveal the results of vice, folly and unreason as
Megumi Iwama as Muse #2, Sierra Boggess as ####-###, Kaliswa Brewster as Intern, Cara Seymour as Muse #3, Jennifer Regan as Philanthropoid, Ian Joseph Paget as Prometheus Dancer, Aerina Park DeBoer as Pot-Bellied Child. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
"THE EARLY PERFORMANCES OF TAYLOR MAC" SEAN EDGECOMB
a warning to an erring humanity.” Rather than moralizing or condemning sexual liberation, the “erring humanity" that Mac attempts to combat in Red Tide Blooming is the conservative American right wing. On a Candide-like journey, Mac-as-Olokun encounters a cast of “citizens” who declare their distaste for diversity, led by the Collective Conscious, a sweater puppet who condemns social subversion with Wizard of Oz-like brainwashing. The play-within-the-play warns of an impending Armageddon brought on by the conformist agenda of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Red Tide Blooming marked the first time that the media equated Mac with Ludlam’s work. Phoebe Hoban of The New York Times noted that they had “taken a page from Charles Ludlam's Theatre of the Ridiculous,” and Martin Denton of nytheatre.com credited Mac for turning the Ludlamesque “upside-down and inside-out.” The critical and popular success of Red Tide Blooming secured Mac's identity as a contemporary Ridiculous performer, but it also gave them the confidence to bravely take their reinventive interpretation of the Ludlamesque beyond the site of its origin, attempting to expand the neoRidiculous community in New York City and beyond.
The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac (2006)
Following the run of Red Tide Blooming, Mac created a solo show that they could tour widely and easily, the Be(A)st of Taylor Mac. Borrowing from the form of a traveling carnival, they transformed their fool into a wandering troubadour, who was perhaps closest in character to Ludlam’s Fool in The Grand Tarot. Mac’s carnival world recalls Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “carnivalesque,” where participants are invited to live in a topsy-turvy world of queer inversion. Through touring, Mac extended the queer world they created in The Face of Liberalism and Red Tide Blooming, expanding the boundaries of their fool society beyond New York, where these earlier shows had taken place.
A cabaret that collages recycled songs from Red Tide Blooming with new songs and transitional monologues in an intertextual pastiche reminiscent of Ludlam, Be(A)st premiered at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival in 2006 and revolves around Mac with their ukulele, a trunk of draggy garments, and the war cry “the revolution will not be masculinized,” which is also the title of the opening song. At various times during its two-year run in over forty theaters around the globe, Mac dedicated performances of Be(A)st to victims of hate crimes and violence spurred by their sexuality or sexual identity. For example, on Valentine’s Day in San Francisco in
2008, they dedicated the show to Lawrence Forbes King, a transgender teenager who, two days earlier, had been shot and killed in a classroom at his high school in Oxnard, California. This sympathetic and jarring technique set the stage for an evening of life-affirming yet brutal honesty.
Exploring Mac’s personal role within the vast and complicated globalization of the work, Be(A)st covers everything from past lovers to national security, masturbation, and manatees. At one point, attempting to express their own polysexuality, Mac reveals “I want to be a mermaid, merman, mermanmaid.” Not only does this intentionally connect back to Smith, the mermaid Parade, and Red Tide Blooming, it also expresses a chimerical identity that is hypersexualized while also nonhuman, nongendered, and physically without genitalia. The mermanmaid symbolically represents the anti-identitarian action of ungendering, allowing Mac a freedom of choice to dictate a fluid identity, rather than one based on a normative binary of cissexuality; they colloquially refer to this act as
Taylor Mac as Artist. Photo by Hollis King.
"THE EARLY PERFORMANCES OF TAYLOR MAC" SEAN EDGECOMB
the radical process of “embracing all pronouns.” In fact, following this period, Mac would begin to use the gender pronoun “judy” [sic], inspired in part by Judy Garland, in performance. In Be(A)st Mac theatrically embodies the concept of fluid and pluralistic gender by quickly peeling away garments onstage, transforming their body with various outfits that actively represent the possibility of playing with identity, as well as visually delineating different characters and scenes.
At the conclusion of the show, the space is littered with the garments and accessories that Mac has thrown off, creating a multilayered art-piece-cum-archive that ephemerally records each evening's unique performance. In transforming the theater into a Wunderkammer adorned with strewn-about costumes, props, and errant sequins and glitter, Mac marks the audience as an extension of the carnival space. By the end of the performance, audience members are no longer merely observers, but are invited to join a queer world that has been created, a diasporic society of fools with Mac as its liberator.
Be(A)st is altered from performance to performance with the addition of local and timely references and discussion with the audience, but Mac closes each evening’s performance with their signature hymn, “Fear Itself.” The folk-style song recalls the community-forming anthem of Ludlam’s era, as well as Bakhtin’s notion that “folk humor” is a foundation of the carnival space. Mac initiates community spirit by inviting audience members to participate in the refrain “we've nothing to fear but fear itself, fear itself, fear itself.” As the lights come up in the auditorium, the audience—now a chorus—is encouraged to view the attending others in a new light, as Mac attempts to ignite sparks of communitas. This act of transformation from distanced observer to engaged participant, which Jill Dolan describes as “moments in the perpetual present,” marks the emergence of a new and fleetingly utopic community through a temporal queering, while still encouraging autonomy and individuality among audience members.
The Young Ladies of ... (2007)
Following their own initial exploration of their own experiences and emotions in Be(A)st, Mac evolved their Ridiculous fool by developing their most personal and autobiographical performance, The Young Ladies of ….The play was inspired by several boxes of letters that Mac’s late father, Robert Mac Bowyer, received from women after placing a singles advertisement in the back of the Australian Daily Telegraph in 1968 when he was stationed
in Vietnam. Bowyer died in a motorcycle accident when Mac was age four, and The Young Ladies of … was Mac's lyrical attempt at creating a tangible interpretation of their father through word and memories suspended in scores of letters. In this play about growing up both physically and emotionally, Mac wanted to “discover some common ground,” and “[bridge] the gap between masculinity and femininity, fathers and sons and red and blue states.”
Young Ladies is set in a purgatory of postmarked envelopes and stage fog where Mac’s fool persona matures during the course of the play, trading youthful abandon for a selfawareness born of experience. Mac’s transformation from Pétit de Julleville jeunesse into an adult is set in motion when they are isolated from the society that they created for themselves to inhabit in their earlier plays. The fool of this performance poetically reflects on their familial past, while the haunting refrain of “The Carousel Waltz” from Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945) suggests Mac’s displacement from the carnival they once called home. According to family lore, the film Carousel (1956) was Bowyer’s favorite, causing Mac to equate their father with the rough-and-tumble character of Billy Bigelow: “I imagine my father’s favorite character in the movie Carousel was the central character of the wife-beater. No, not the T-shirt but the actual person. Bill, that’s his name. And Bill was a tough macho kinda guy, as wife-beaters tend to be.” Although the strained relationship between a hypermasculine father and son is a common aspect of the shared American gay experience, Mac was the first Ridiculous artist to tackle it in performance.
In true Ridiculous form, Mac relies on the letters not only for their concept, but also for their practice: the letters become puppets, masks, and finally a dress that Mac gleefully sports in a grand dance to “The Carousel Waltz.” This approach brings Smith’s and Ludlam’s common practice of recycling trash into camp-infused beauty to a more sophisticated level rich in symbolism and sentiment. During the course of the run, Mac used a program note to invite audience members to send in letters to the theater, a proposal that was successful in exponentially increasing the piles of mail onstage and physically representing a network of collective belonging. This technique of creative recycling also forms a queer archive, which Halberstam defines as “not simply a repository; [but] also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity.” Mac actualizes this notion by creating a physical legacy of the voices in the text, but also of many who attended the performance. As a continuation of this trope, the climactic gesture of donning the paper dress of letters revives Mac’s spirit from their
"THE EARLY PERFORMANCES OF TAYLOR MAC" SEAN EDGECOMB
state of melancholy reflection; draped in the epistolary correspondence of their queer family in the form of a garment bearing the handwriting of dozens of contributors, Mac escapes from the limbo-like world of the play in this new suit of armor, dragging the train of letters behind and reciting the mantra, “I hope. I hope. I hope. I hope.”
This optimistic final action and dialogue not only conclude Young Ladies, it also symbolically marks the end of the first stage of Mac’s performative career. The Young Ladies of..., The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac, Red Tide Blooming, and The Face of Liberalism together form a body of work that is reflective of Mac's urgency to explore what it meant to be a queer American in the period directly following 9/11. The poignant coherency and quality of these works attracted the attention of New Dramatists, which awarded Mac a Playwright in Residency (2007-2014). This position ushered in a new artistic phase for Mac, providing an extended period of sustained funding that would allow them to subsist solely as a professional playwright and performer.
Conclusion
Mac’s fool persona has matured into a sophisticated cultural mouthpiece through practice, growing popular support, and recognition of its artistic and political value. The development of Mac-as-queer-fool is fundamental to understanding their revival of the Ridiculous sensibility and practice by reshaping Ludlam’s legacy as a reflection of the
contemporary world. Although as a theatrical form, the ridiculous broke down the walls of concealment through the act of public performance, at its origin, it constituted a safe space that allowed for freedom of expression without fear of homophobic discrimination. For this reason, the Ridiculous legacy has not been broadly accessible, but instead has been disseminated and transformed through internal channels of self-defined kinship. Mac has extended such alternative channels of transmission by bringing their queer fool society to new locations and audiences, inviting a more diverse group of people into the neo-Ridiculous fold. Rather than trying to reproduce the work of its originators, Mac has used the queer legacy of the Ridiculous to pick up from where they left off. This approach has allowed Mac to maintain and transform the past within the present via performance, live and virtual, avoiding revivalism and upholding the Ridiculous as a genre with continued relevance as a mode for building a supportive community. In the Ridiculous theater, channeling predecessors in the present takes the shape of the archival/temporal drag through the reinvention of the classical figure of the clown, layering it with the postmodern fool. Now well into the second stage of their career, Mac continues to grow performances out of the groundwork set by the plays written and performed in the fundamental period between 2002 and 2007, producing works that continue to open up new dimensions in their ever-evolving exploration of neo-Ridiculous performance.
Taylor Mac as Artist. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
SIERRA BOGGESS (####-###). Broadway: Harmony, School of Rock, It Shoulda Been You, The Phantom of the Opera (25th Anniversary and with Norm Lewis) , Master Class, The Little Mermaid (Drama Desk and Drama League nominations, Broadway.com Audience Choice Award). London: Les Misérables , 25th anniversary concerts of The Phantom of the Opera at Royal Albert Hall, and Love Never Dies (Olivier Award nomination). Other New York theater: The Good-bye Girl, The Secret Garden, Guys & Dolls at Carnegie Hall, Love, Loss, and What I Wore, Music in the Air (Encores!). Film/TV: Vulture Club with Susan Sarandon and the web series “What’s Your Emergency,” directed by Michael Urie.
KALISWA BREWSTER (Intern) is a first-generation Liberian-American actor & producer based in New York City. She is delighted to make her TFANA debut with Darko, who cast her in her first Equity project at The Williamstown Theatre Festival. They have since collaborated on Romeo and Juliet (Juliet), Macbeth at Hartford Stage, and a symphony production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. On-screen, Kaliswa has recurred on “Billions,” “Time After Time,” and “Release,” with appearances on “Law & Order,” “Blue Bloods,” and more. She is President of the Board of Molière in the Park, a 2025 Theatre Producers of Color cohort member, and a member of The BTU New Guard for Black Theatre United.
AERINA PARK DEBOER (Pot-Bellied Child) is thrilled to be making her TFANA debut! Off-Broadway: Ragtime (NY City Center), The Hunt (St. Ann's Warehouse). National Tours: Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (Cindy Lou Who). TV/ Film: “Étoile” (Amazon Prime), “Wonder Pets” (Apple TV+), “The Calling” (NBC Peacock), A Life, Lost (short film). Other: Grounded (Met Opera), Firebird (NYCB). Aerina studies dance at the School of American Ballet and BDC, and speaks Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Thanks to her family, Leorah Haberfield, Mallory Levy, and her coaches and teachers. @aerinaparkdeboer
MEGUMI IWAMA (Muse #2) , originally from Orange County, CA, now based in NYC, has performed a variety of works by choreographers including Donald McKayle, Charlotte Griffin, Maleek Washington, Candace Brown, and Bo Park. She holds a BFA-Choreography and BFA-Performance from UC Irvine. Off Broadway credits include Company XIV’s Nutcracker Rouge and Seven Sins directed by Austin McCormick, and Ain’t Done Bad directed by Jakob Karr. Film/TV credits include Mean Girls the movie. Meg is thrilled to be part of this production!
TAYLOR MAC (Artist , Playwright) is a MacArthur “genius”, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Tony nominee for Best Play, and the recipient of the International Ibsen Award. Selected works include: Bark of Millions; Joy and Pandemic; The Hang; The Fre; Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus; A 24-Decade History of Popular Music; Hir; The Walk Across America for Mother Earth; and The Lily’s Revenge. Films include: Whitman in the Woods (streaming on All Arts) and Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music (streaming on Max).
JASON O'CONNELL ($#@%$) . Off-Broadway: Pride and Prejudice (Primary Stages), Happy Birthday, Wanda June (Wheelhouse/Duke on 42nd St), Judgment Day (Park Avenue Armory), Sense and Sensibility (Bedlam/Gym at Judson), The Light and The Dark (Primary Stages), Becomes A Woman (The Mint/City Center), The Saintliness of Margery Kempe (The Duke on 42nd St), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Pearl), The Seagull (Bedlam/Sheen Center), and multiple incarnations of Jason's solo show, The Dork Knight (Joe’s Pub, Abingdon Theatre Company, Primary Stages, Bedlam, etc). Regional: American Repertory Theater, Old Globe, Syracuse Stage, Two River Theater, Hartford Stage, Chautauqua Theater Company, Cape Playhouse, Hudson Valley Shakespeare, among others. TV: “Search Party,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” For Kate.
IAN JOSEPH PAGET (Prometheus, Fight Captain) (he/him) is a multi-hyphenate performer and content creator, seen in Hulu’s “Reasonable Doubt” and “Welcome to Chippendales” from “Pam & Tommy” creator Robert Siegel. His Broadway credits include Soul Doctor, Leap of Faith, and Mamma Mia!. Other theater credits: This Ain’t No Disco!, Paul in A Chorus Line, Arab in West Side Story, Escape to Margaritaville, and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Film/TV: Rock of Ages, Step Up Revolution, “Mozart in the Jungle,” “One Life to Live,” “Lip Sync Battle,” “SNL.” Ian co-hosts the GLAAD-nominated “Tres Leches” podcast. Thank you to Darko for bringing me on to this show! You can follow Ian on TikTok @ianpaget_ and Instagram @ianpaget.
THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
JENNIFER REGAN (Philanthropoid) Broadway: Born Yesterday, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (standby). West End: The Lady from Dubuque (Royal Haymarket). Off-Broadway: The Wind and the Rain (EnGarde Arts/Vineyard), Straight Line Crazy (The Shed), How I Learned to Drive (Second Stage), Buffalo Gal (Primary Stages), Pig Farm (Standby, Roundabout). Regional: Sweat (Norton Award nomination, Huntington Theater); Girls (Yale Rep); An Octoroon and Troublemaker (Berkeley Rep); Twelfth Night (Hartford Stage), Lost in Yonkers, Resurrection Blues, and The Trojan Women (all at the Old Globe). TV/Film: “Crossover Event: Chicago Fire, PD, and Med” (NBC), “The Good Nurse” (Netflix), “The Heart, She Holler” and “Neon Joe: Werewolf Hunter” (Adult Swim), “Law & Order: SVU,” “FBI: Most Wanted,” “God Friended Me,” “Elementary,” “Blindspot,” “Happyish,” The Humbling, My Dead Boyfriend, The Normals, and The Winning Season.
CARA SEYMOUR (Muse #3, Dance Captain) is a freelance dancer, producer, and performer. A graduate of The Juilliard School, Cara's past work includes: The Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Spiegelworld, Company XIV, Tom Gold Dance, Brian Brooks Moving Company, White Wave Dance, Ballet Nepantla, and MOMIX, among others. Cara's dancing has been featured on Amazon Prime's “Etoile”, HBO's “The Gilded Age”, “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon”, and The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. She is also an avid cross-genre collaborator, working closely and collaboratively with a variety of photographers, visual artists, and musicians to bring their vision to life.
JENNIFER SMITH (Stage Manager) is a veteran of 15 Broadway shows including Gentleman’s Guide and Anastasia , both directed by Darko Tresnjak. She is the recipient of a 2022 Connecticut Critic’s Circle Award for Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret at Goodspeed Opera House. A single cat lady, she is happy to travel anywhere in the world.
EM STOCKWELL (Muse #1) is an Australian/American actor, dancer, singer and creative force. A graduate of Brent St (SYD) and AMDA (NYC), they have appeared in several Off-Broadway productions at Company XIV ( Seven Sins, Cocktail Magique and Queen of Hearts ), as well as in indie films and new works across the city. Em is passionate about bold storytelling, fashion, laughter and nightlife. They can also be found dancing and choreographing at The Stranger NYC. Follow their adventures @emstockwell_ Love to all of humanity!
DARKO TRESNJAK (Director) won the Tony Award, the Drama Desk, and the Outer Critics Circle Award for his direction of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. He won an Obie Award for his direction of Ionesco’s The Killer at Theatre for a New Audience. Darko also directed All's Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, and Antony and Cleopatra at TFANA. From 2004 to 2009, Darko was the Artistic Director of the Old Globe Shakespeare Festival. From 2011 to 2019, he was the Artistic Director of Hartford Stage Company. As a director of plays, musicals, and operas, Darko has worked at Joseph Papp Public Theater, Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Royal Shakespeare Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Geffen Playhouse, Vineyard Theatre Company, Atlantic Theater Company, Alley Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Huntington Theatre Company, Long Wharf Theatre Company, Goodspeed Musicals, Geva Theatre Center, Westport Country Playhouse, Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and Santa Fe Opera.
ALEXANDER DODGE (Scenic Designer). TFANA: Antony and Cleopatra. Broadway: I Need That, Anastasia, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Tony nomination), Present Laughter (Tony nomination), Old Acquaintance, Butley, Hedda Gabler. Off-Broadway: Russian Troll Farm, Harry Clarke, The Whisper House, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme (Lortel winner) at Lincoln Center. Regional: Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Ja Jolla and Paper Mill Playhouses). London West End: Harry Clarke, All New People. Opera: Samson et Dalila: Metropolitan Opera; The Thirteenth Child: Santa Fe; Ghosts of Versailles: L.A. Opera; Ukiyo-E: Grand Théâtre de Genève; Il trittico: Deutsche Oper Berlin, Lohengrin: Budapest. MFA: Yale.
ANITA YAVICH (Costume Designer) Broadway: Floyd Collins, Yellow Face, Fool for Love, Venus in Fur, Chinglish, Anna in the Tropics. Off-Broadway: Soft Power, Oedipus El Rey (The Public); Only Gold, The Legend of Georgia McBride, The Submission, Coraline, The Wooden Breeks (MCC); The Mother (Atlantic); The View Upstairs (Lynn Redgrave); Letters From Max, Thom Pain, Big Love, Kung Fu, Golden Child, Iphigenia 2.0 (Signature); Nathan the Wise, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Orlando, New Jerusalem, Texts for Nothing (CSC); The Best We Could (MTC); Apologia (Roundabout). Opera: The Monkey King (San Francisco Opera), Der Ring des Nibelungen (Opera Australia). Awards: Obie, Lortel, Drama Desk. Puppet and mask designer for the film Megalopolis.
THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
MATTHEW RICHARDS (Lighting Designer). TFANA: Measure For Measure, Tamburlaine, and The Killer. Broadway: Ann starring Holland Taylor. Opera: Macbeth at LA Opera. Off-Broadway: The Atlantic; B.A.M.; Geva; LCT3; MCC; The Mint; Playwrights Horizons; Play Co.; Primary Stages; Second Stage; Rattlestick Theater; Soho Rep. Regional: Actor’s Theater of Louisville; The Alley; Arena Stage; Baltimore’s Center Stage; Cincinnati Playhouse; Cleveland Playhouse; Dallas Theater Center; Ford’s Theatre; The Geffen; The Goodman; The Guthrie; Hartford Stage; The Huntington; Long Wharf; La Jolla Playhouse; The Old Globe; Repertory Theatre of St. Louis; Shakespeare Theatre; Syracuse Stage; Westport Playhouse; Williamstown Theatre Festival; Yale Repertory Theatre.
JANE SHAW (Sound Designer) designed Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Tamburlaine, The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and The Killer with TFANA. New York work includes Bedlam's Music City, and productions at Playwrights Horizons, the Mint, MTC, and the Roundabout. Ms. Shaw has designed at the Huntington, the Guthrie, the Alley, Cleveland Play House, Long Wharf, Hartford Stage, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and The Old Globe. Recognition: Drama Desk, Henry Award, Bessie Award, Meet the Composer Grant, and several Lortel nominations. Graduate of Harvard University and the Yale School of Drama. https://www.janeshaw.com/
ORAN ELDOR (Music) is an award-nominated composer and orchestrator. Broadway: Fiddler on the Roof (2015, dance arrangements). Composer: Musicals: Ask for the Moon - book and lyrics by Darko Tresnjak (Goodspeed), Mythic (London, Montreal, upcoming US premiere in Cincinnati Playhouse). TV: “Sesame Street – Israel,” “Peg + Cat” (PBS), “Coming Home” Kristin Chenoweth (orchestrations). Orchestrations for John Legend, Andrea Bocelli, and major symphonies worldwide including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago Philharmonic. Composition Fellow at the Royal Opera House, London; graduate of Berklee College of Music. BMI Workshop.
AARON RHYNE (Projections Designer) Designs include BROADWAY: Anastasia (Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award), for colored girls…, The Sound Inside (Outer Critics Circle Award), A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Drama Desk Award), Bonnie and Clyde. TV: “ Hasan Minhaj: The King’s Jester” (Netflix). OFF-BROADWAY: Drag: The Musical (New World Stages), The Big Gay Jamboree (Orpheum) Sorry For Your Loss, The Way She Spoke (Audible), This Ain’t No Disco (Atlantic). OPERA: The Thirteenth Child (Santa Fe Opera), The Ghosts of Versailles (LA Opera), La Traviata (Wolftrap), Florencia en el Amazonas (Florida Grand, Opera Colorado). @aaronrhynedesigns www.aaronrhyne.com
Kaliswa Brewster as Intern, Jason O’Connell as $#@%$, Jennifer Regan as Philanthropoid, Jennifer Smith as Stage Manager. Photo by Hollis King.
THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
AUSTIN MCCORMICK (Choreographer) is a director, choreographer and producer known for genre-defying spectacles that fuse opera, ballet, circus, burlesque and immersive hospitality. A Juilliard graduate and founder of Brooklyn’s COMPANY XIV, McCormick creates lavish, boundary-blurring productions in his opulent venue, Théâtre XIV. He also helms COCKTAIL MAGIQUE, a hedonistic speakeasy where mixology, magic, and burlesque entwine. His signature “Baroque Burlesque™” style reimagines classical forms through a provocative, contemporary lens. Forbes wrote, “McCormick is building a new performance paradigm… a gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art… imagination blowing.” www.companyxiv.com @austinmccormickxiv
ROCÍO MENDEZ (Fight and Intimacy Choreographer) was recently nominated for two Drama Desk Awards and is the resident Intimacy Director at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Credits include: Broadway: POTUS, AIN’T NO MO, Merrily We Roll Along, The Great Gatsby. Off-Broadway/Regional Theater: Gatsby (A.R.T), How To Defend Yourself, On Sugarland (NYTW), The Bandaged Place (Roundabout) ,The Harder They Come, Merry Wives, Romeo y Julieta (Public Theater), NIOR (The Alley Theater), Vietgone, The Royale (Geva Theater Center). www.rociomendez.com
SARAH CIMINO (Makeup Designer) is a makeup artist and designer based in NYC. Design credits include- Broadway: Redwood, Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Caroline or Change. Off-Broadway: The Connecter (MCC), Nutcracker Rouge, Cocktail Magique, Seven Sins, Queen of Hearts (Company XIV). Regional: GATSBY (A.R.T), Notes on Killing... (Yale Rep). Makeup constulant: Little Island, MCC, New York City Center, Park Avenue Armory, NY Philharmonic, Public Theatre SITP, Ars Nova, National Black Theatre. Sarah is a member of the Juilliard School's Drama Faculty and guest teaching artist for the Juilliard Dance Division and NYU's Graduate Acting dept. Member Local #798
TOM WATSON (Hair and Wig Designer). Originally from Northern Ireland, he headed the wig/makeup department at the Metropolitan Opera for 17 years. He has designed more than 100 Broadway productions, including Wicked , Rock of Ages , The King & I , Fiddler on the Roof, Oslo, Falsettos, The Little Foxes, Junk, My Fair Lady, King Kong, All My Sons, The Great Society, Plaza Suite, Parade , Floyd Collins, and Just In Time.
ANDREW WADE (Resident Voice Director). Broadway: Harry Potter and The Cursed Child Parts One and Two (U.S. Head of Voice and Dialect), King Lear with Glenda Jackson (Voice Coach), Matilda the Musical (Director of Voice) and national tour. Royal Shakespeare Company: Head of Voice (1990-2003). The Public Theater: Director of Voice. NYTW: Othello with Daniel Craig. The Guthrie Theater: since 2002. Teaching: Juilliard (Adjunct Faculty Drama Division), Stella Adler Studio (Master Teacher Voice and Speech). Film: Shakespeare in Love. Workshops and Lectures: Worldwide. Fellow: Rose Bruford College.
Megumi Iwama as Muse #2, Em Stockwell as Muse #1, Cara Seymour as Muse #3. Photo by Travis
Emery Hackett.
THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
JON KNUST (Properties Supervisor) Selected credits include: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Broadway); Waiting for Godot, Des Moines, The Merchant of Venice, Gnit, The Winter's Tale, The Skin of Our Teeth, About Alice, The Father, and A Doll’s House (TFANA); We Live In Cairo (NYTW); A Bright New Boise, Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, Big Love and Appropriate (Signature); and Peter and the Starcatcher (tour). Jon got his start in props at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University.
JONATHAN KALB (Dramaturg) is professor of theatre at Hunter College, CUNY and is TFANA’s resident dramaturg. The author of five books on theatre, he has worked for more than three decades as a theatre scholar, critic, journalist and dramaturg. He has twice won The George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and has also won the George Freedley Award for an outstanding theatre book from the Theatre Library Association. He often writes about theatre on his TheaterMatters blog at jonathankalb.com.
SHANE SCHNETZLER (Production Stage Manager)(he/him). TFANA: Soho Rep’s Fairview, Macbeth (An Undoing), Waiting for Godot, Orpheus Descending, Des Moines, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, Why?, Julius Caesar, The Emperor, Heart/Box, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Tamburlaine, Fiasco’s Cymbeline. Off-Broadway: All the World’s a Stage, Fish, Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Keen Company) Fatherland (City Center), Seven Deadly Sins (Tectonic) , Noura, This Flat Earth, The Profane, Rancho Viejo, Familiar (Playwrights Horizons); Napoli, Brooklyn, Look Back in Anger (Roundabout); The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Comedy of Errors (NYSF).
SAMMY LANDAU (Assistant Stage Manager)(they/them). Broadway: Water for Elephants (Sub-ASM), Sunset Blvd (PA). Off-Broadway: The Merchant of Venice, Waiting for Godot, Orpheus Descending, Des Moines (TFANA); Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods (Rattlestick & New Georges Theater); Mary Gets Hers (The Playwright’s Realm); Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Keen Company); Sleep No More (PunchdrunkNYC); Life and Trust (Emursive); Seven Deadly Sins (Tectonic Theater Project). Regional: The World Goes ‘Round (Manhattan School of Music); Kiss (ArtsEmerson); Bootycandy (Speakeasy Stage Co.); Moby Dick, Girlfriend, Cock, Unexpected Joy, Alabama Story (Wellfleet Harbor Actor’s Theater).
BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES (Press Representative) is a Brooklyn-based public relations firm representing arts organizations and cultural institutions. Clients include St. Ann’s Warehouse, Playwrights Horizons, Signature Theatre, Soho Rep, National Sawdust, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, PEN America, StoryCorps, Symphony Space, the Fisher Center at Bard, Peak Performances, Irish Arts Center, the Merce Cunningham Trust, the Onassis Foundation, Taylor Mac, Page 73, The Playwrights Realm, PlayCo and more.
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE. Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director Dorothy Ryan, TFANA is a home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. TFANA explores the ever-changing forms of world theatre and creates a dialogue between the language and ideas of Shakespeare and diverse authors, past and present. TFANA also builds associations with artists from around the world and supports their development through commissions, translations, and residencies.
In 2001, TFANA became the first American theatre invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in 2007, TFANA returned to the RSC. In 2025, TFANA toured its production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice starring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock and directed by Arin Arbus to the Royal Lyceum Theatre of Edinburgh, Scotland.
TFANA performs for audiences of all ages and backgrounds; is devoted to economically accessible tickets and promotes humanities and education programs. TFANA has played on Broadway, Off Broadway and toured internationally and nationally. In 2013, it opened its first permanent home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center (PSC), Brooklyn, with the 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage and the 50-seat Theodore Rogers Studio.
ACTORS' EQUITY ASSOCIATION
(“Equity”), founded in 1913, is the U.S. labor union that represents more than 50,000 actors and stage managers. Equity seeks to foster the art of live theatre as an essential component of society and advances the careers of its members by negotiating wages and working conditions and providing a wide range of benefits including health and pension plans. Actors’ Equity is a member of the AFL-CIO and is affiliated with FIA, an international organization of performing arts unions. #EquityWorks
THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
STAFF FOR PROSPEROUS FOOLS
Associate Director.......................................Violeta Picayo
Associate Scenic Designer.....................Clayton Dombach
Associate Costume Designer..............................Willa Piro
Assistant Costume Designer...............................Aixa Loor
Millinery.......................................Denise Wallace-Spriggs
Wardrobe Supervisor....................................AB Lotspeich
Dresser.............................................................Maia Soltis
Hair & Wig Supervisor..............................Lauren Wright
Young Cast Coordinator...................................Julia Atkin
Assistant Lighting Designer........................Amara McNeil
Associate Projection Design.....................Gabriel Aronson
Assistant Projection Design..............................Luz Gaitan
Video Projection Programmer........................Don Ceislik
Associate Video Designer...........................Katerina Vitaly
Assistant Sound Designer..............................CJ Whitaker
Production Consultant...............................Matt McAdon
Production Associate................................Charlie Lovejoy
Production Assistant......................................Adam Foster
Production Electrician......................Alexandra Nemfakos
Deck/Props Carpenter.......................Tristan Viner-Brown
Light Board Programmer and Operator.......Paul Kennedy A1...............................................................Zoe McGlynn
Costumes constructed by John Kristiansen Studio
Fabric painting by Hochi Asiatico and Sophie Lin
Nymph dresses constructed by Nancy Palmatier
Custom boots by T.O. Dey Custom Made Shoes
Puppet created by Sam Hill Studio
Scenery Provided by Daedalus Design & Production
Prosperous Fools was rehearsed at MARK MORRIS DANCE CENTER.
Megumi Iwama as Muse #2, Em Stockwell as Muse #1, Jennifer Regan as Philanthropoid, Ian Joseph Paget as Prometheus Dancer, Cara Seymour as Muse #3, Kaliswa Brewster as Intern, Taylor Mac as Artist. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE LEADERSHIP
JEFFREY HOROWITZ (Founding Artistic Director) began his career in theatre as an actor and appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theatre. In 1979, he founded Theatre for a New Audience. Horowitz has served on the panel of the New York State Council on the Arts, on the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group, the advisory board of the Shakespeare Society and the artistic directorate of London’s Globe Theatre. Awards: 2003 John Houseman Award from The Acting Company, 2004 Gaudium Award from Breukelein Institute, 2019 Obie Lifetime Achievement and TFANA’s 2020 Samuel H. Scripps.
ARIN ARBUS (Artistic Director-elect). Arbus served as Associate Artistic Director at TFANA for a decade, during which time she directed: Othello, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, A Doll’s House, The Father, The Skin of Our Teeth (Obie). Upon leaving this post, Arbus served as TFANA’s Resident Director, directing Des Moines, Waiting for Godot, The Merchant of Venice , starring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock, also playing at Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC and Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. Outside TFANA: Deep Blue Sound by Abe Koogler for Clubbed Thumb; The Lehman Trilogy , at Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Guthrie; Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune , (Tony Nom for best revival) starring Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon; and Verdi’s La Traviata for Canadian Opera Company (8 Dora nominations), Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Houston Grand Opera.
DOROTHY RYAN (Managing Director) joined Theatre for a New Audience in 2003 after a ten-year fundraising career with the 92nd Street Y and Brooklyn Museum. Ryan began her career in classical music artist management and also served as company manager and managing leader for several regional opera companies. She is a Brooklyn Women of Distinction honoree and was a founding member of the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance.
CHLOE KNIGHT (General Manager) is a graduate of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale’s Theater Management program, and recipient of Yale’s 2024 Morris J. Kaplan Prize in Theater Management. Knight has served as Associate Managing Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, assistant to the president of LORT, CoManaging Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret, Company Manager at Yale Rep, and Management Fellow at Lincoln Center Theater. Before earning her MFA, she held myriad fundraising positions at Page 73, consulting firm Advance NYC, and The Lark.
Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage. Photo © Francis Dzikowski/OTTO.
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE STAFF, MISSION, BOARD
About Theatre for a New Audience
Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director Dorothy Ryan, TFANA is a New York City home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. TFANA explores the ever-changing forms of world theatre and creates a dialogue between the language and ideas of Shakespeare and diverse authors, past and present. TFANA also builds associations with artists from around the world and supports their development through commissions, translations, and residencies.
STAFF
Founding Artistic Director
Jeffrey Horowitz
Artistic Director-Elect Arin Arbus
Managing Director Dorothy Ryan
General Manager Chloe Knight
Director of Institutional Advancement
James J. Lynes
Finance Director Mary Sormeley
Education Director Lindsay Tanner
Director of Marketing & Communications
Eddie Carlson
Facilities Director Rashawn Caldwell
Director of Production Jeff Harris
Technical Director Ellie Engstrom
Associate Director of Development
Sara Billeaux
Artistic Associate Peter Cook
Associate Producer Allison Benko
Company Manager Molly Burdick
Theatre Manager Lawrence Dial
Box Office Manager Allison Byrum
Marketing Manager Angela Renzi
Education Manager Emma Griffone
Coordinator, Administration & Humanities/Studio Programs
Zoe Donovan
New Deal Program Coordinator Zhe Pan
Institutional Giving Associate Madison Wetzell
Finance Associate Harmony Fiori
Development Associate Suzanne Lenz
Development Associate Gavin McKenzie
Facilities Associate Tim Tyson
Archivist Shannon Resser
TFANA Teaching Artists
Matthew Dunivan, Melanie Goodreaux, Albert Iturregui-Elias, Margaret Ivey, Elizabeth London, Erin McCready, Marissa Stewart, Kea Trevett
House Managers
Nancy Gill Sanchez, Denise Ivanoff, Jasmine Louis
Press Representative
Blake Zidell & Associates
Resident Casting Director Jack Doulin
Resident Dramaturg Jonathan Kalb
Resident Distinguished Artist
John Douglas Thompson
Resident Voice and Text Director
Andrew Wade
TFANA Council of Scholars
Tanya Pollard, Chair
Jonathan Kalb, Alisa Solomon, Ayanna Thompson
Concessions Sweet Hospitality Group
Legal Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton
Accounting: Sax LLP
In 2001, TFANA became the first American theatre invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in 2007, TFANA returned to the RSC. In 2025, TFANA toured its production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice starring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock and directed by Arin Arbus to the Royal Lyceum Theatre of Edinburgh, Scotland.
TFANA performs for audiences of all ages and backgrounds, is devoted to economically accessible tickets, and promotes humanities and education programs. TFANA has played on Broadway, Off Broadway and toured internationally and nationally. In 2013, it opened its first permanent home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center (PSC), Brooklyn, with the 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage and the 50-seat Theodore Rogers Studio.
Theatre for a New Audience Education Programs
Theatre for a New Audience’s education programs introduce students to Shakespeare and other classics with the same artistic integrity that we apply to our productions. Through our unique and exciting methodology, students engage in hands-on learning that involves all aspects of literacy set in the context of theatre education. Our residencies are structured to address City and State Learning Standards both in English Language Arts and the Arts, the New York City DOE’s Curriculum Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Theater, and the New York State Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts. Begun in 1984, our programs have served more than 140,000 students, ages 9 through 18, in New York City Public Schools city-wide.
A Home in Brooklyn: Polonsky Shakespeare Center
Theatre for a New Audience’s home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is a centerpiece of the Brooklyn Cultural District.
Designed by celebrated architect Hugh Hardy, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is the first New York City theatre conceived and built for classic drama since Lincoln Center’s 1965 Vivian Beaumont. The 27,500-square-foot facility is a uniquely flexible performance space. The 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, inspired by the Cottesloe at London’s National Theatre, combines an Elizabethan courtyard theatre with modern theatre technology. It allows the stage and seating to be reconfigured for each production. The facility also includes the Theodore C. Rogers Studio (a 50-seat rehearsal/performance studio), and theatrical support spaces. The City of New York-developed Arts Plaza, designed by landscape architect Ken Smith, creates a natural gathering place around the building. In addition, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is also one of the few sustainable (green) theatres in the country, with LEED-NC Silver rating from the United States Green Building Council.
Now with a home of its own, Theatre for a New Audience is contributing to the continued renaissance of Downtown Brooklyn. In addition to its season of plays, the Theatre has expanded its Humanities offerings to include lectures, seminars, workshops, and other activities for artists, scholars, and the general public. When not in use by the Theatre, its new facility is available for rental, bringing much needed affordable performing and rehearsal space to the community.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Board Chair
Robert E. Buckholz
Vice Chair
Kathleen C. Walsh
President
Jeffrey Horowitz
Founding Artistic Director
Vice President and Secretary
Dorothy Ryan
Managing Director
Executive Committee
Alan Beller
Robert E. Buckholz
Constance Christensen
Jeffrey Horowitz
Seymour H. Lesser
Larry M. Loeb
Philip R. Rotner
Kathleen C. Walsh
Josh Weisberg
Members
Arin Arbus*
John Berendt*
Bianca Vivion Brooks*
Ben Campbell
Robert Caro*
Jonathan R. Donnellan
Sharon Dunn*
Matthew E. Fishbein
Riccardo Hernandez*
Kathryn Hunter*
Dana Ivey*
Tom Kirdahy*
John Lahr*
Harry J. Lennix*
Catherine Maciariello*
Marie Maignan*
Lindsay H. Mantell*
Audrey Heffernan Meyer*
Alan Polonsky
J.T. Rogers*
Dorothy Ryan
Joseph Samulski*
Doug Steiner
Michael Stranahan
John Douglas Thompson*
John Turturro*
Frederick Wiseman*
*Artistic Council
Emeritus
Francine Ballan
Sally Brody
William H. Burgess III
Caroline Niemczyk
Janet C. Olshansky
Theodore C. Rogers
Mark Rylance*
Daryl D. Smith
Susan Stockel
Monica G.S. Wambold
Jane Wells
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE MAJOR SUPPORTERS
CONTRIBUTORS TO THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE’S ANNUAL FUND
September 1, 2023 – May 22, 2025
Even with capacity audiences, ticket sales account for a small portion of our operating costs. Theatre for a New Audience thanks the following donors for their generous support toward our Annual Campaign. For a list of donors $250 and above, go to www.tfana.org/annualdonors.
PRINCIPAL BENEFACTORS
($100,000 and up)
The Bay and Paul Foundations
City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs
The Ford Foundation
The Hearst Foundations
Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund at The New York Community Trust
The Jerome and Marlène Brody Foundation
The Polonsky Foundation
National Endowment for the Humanities
The SHS Foundation
The Shubert Foundation, Inc.
The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc.
LEADING BENEFACTORS
($50,000 and up)
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine
Constance Christensen
Deloitte & Touche LLP
The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund
The Howard Gilman Foundation, Inc.
The Tow Foundation
Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein
The Whiting Foundation
MAJOR BENEFACTORS
($20,000 and up)
The Achelis and Bodman Foundation
The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation
Alan Beller
Sally Brody
Ben Campbell and Yiba Ng
The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Matt Fishbein and Gail Stone
The George Link Jr. Foundation
Ashley Garrett and Alan Jones
Agnes Gund
The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust
The Hearst Corporation
Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia
Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP
Latham & Watkins LLP
K. Ann McDonald
Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer
National Endowment for the Arts/Arts Midwest
New York State Council on the Arts
New York State Urban Development Corporation
Caroline Niemczyk
Marcia Riklis
The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation
The Starry Night Fund
Douglas C. Steiner
The Stockel Family Foundation
The White Cedar Fund
SUSTAINING BENEFACTORS
($10,000 and up)
Anonymous (2)
The Arnow Family Fund
Arts Consulting Group
Peggy and Keith Anderson
Christine Armstrong and Benjamin Nickoll
Jill and Jay Bernstein
Natalie and Matthew Bernstein
Elaine and Norman Brodsky
Michele and Martin Cohen
M. Salome Galib and Duane McLaughlin
The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation
The Howard Bayne Fund
JKW Foundation
The J.M. Kaplan Fund
Michael M. Kaiser and John S. Roberts
Nora Wren Kerr and John J. Kerr
King & Spalding LLP
Seymour H. Lesser
Larry and Maria-Luisa Loeb
McDermott Will & Emery
Michael Tuch Foundation, Inc.
Janet C. Olshansky
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
Estelle Parsons
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP
Abby Pogrebin and David Shapiro
The Roy Cockrum Foundation
Sarah I. Schieffelin Residuary Trust
Kerri Scharlin and Peter Klosowicz
Susan Schultz and Thomas Faust
Select Equity Group, Inc.
Sidley Austin LLP
The Speyer Family Foundation
Susan Stockel
Tarter Krinsky & Drogin LLP
Anne and William Tatlock
Josh and Jackie Weisberg
PRODUCERS CIRCLE—
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S SOCIETY
($5,000 and up)
Anonymous (2)
Axe-Houghton Foundation
Dominique Bravo and Eric Sloan
The Bulova Stetson Fund
Charney Companies
The Claire Friedlander Family Foundation
Jane Cooney
Katharine and Peter Darrow
Aileen Dresner and Frank R. Drury
Jennifer and Steven Eisenstadt
Therese Esperdy and Robert Neborak
Kirsten Feldman and Hugh Frater
Debra Fine and Martin I. Schneider
Jenny and Jeff Fleishhacker
Roberta Garza
Cynthia Crossen and James Gleick
Debra Goldsmith Robb
Kathy and Steven Guttman
Michael Haggiag
Jennifer and Matt Harris
Russ Heldman
Vanderbilt University OLLI Instructor
Andrea Knutson
Sandy and Eric Krasnoff
Anna and Peter Levin
Vincent Lima
Leah Lipskar
Litowitz Foundation, Inc.
Diane and William F. Lloyd
May and Samuel Rudin Foundation Inc.
Ronay and Richard Menschel
Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss
Philip and Cheryl Milstein
New York City Council
New York City Tourism Foundation
Anne Prost and Olivier Robert
Richenthal Foundation
Pamela Riess
Philip and Janet Rotner
Joseph Samulski and Cynthia Hammond
Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles
Daryl and Joy Smith
Theatre Development Fund
Ayanna Thompson
The Venable Foundation
Margo and Anthony Viscusi
Earl D. Weiner
PRODUCERS CIRCLE—EXECUTIVE
($2,500 and up)
Anonymous (2)
Elizabeth Beller-Dee and Michael Dee
Nancy Blachman and David desJardins
Hilary Brown and Charles Read
Walter Cain and Paulo Ribeiro
Consolidated Edison Company of New York. Inc.
Dennis M. Corrado and
The Breukelein Institute
The Barbara Bell Cumming
Charitable Trust
Christine Cumming
DeLaCour Family Foundation
Jodie and Jonathan Donnellan
Sharon Dunn and Harvey Zirofsky
Suzan and Fred Ehrman
Steven Feinsilver
Foley Hoag LLP
Stuart Freedman
Linda Genereux and Timur Galen
Monica Gerard-Sharp
Pamela Givner
Lauren Glant and Michael Gillespie
Marion and Daniel Goldberg
Katherine Goldsmith
Karoly and Henry Gutman
Jane Hartley and Ralph Schlosstein
Grace Harvey
Thomas Healy and Fred P. Hochberg
Sophia Hughes
The Irwin S. Scherzer Foundation
Maxine Isaacs
Flora and Christoph Kimmich
Kirkland & Ellis Foundation
Cathy and Christopher Lawrence
Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins
Lucille Lortel Foundation
Susan Martin and Alan Belzer
Marta Heflin Foundation
Barbara Forster Moore and Richard Wraxall Moore
Catherine Nyarady and Gabriel Riopel
Sarah Paley and Joseph Kerrey
Ellen Petrino
Proskauer Rose LLP
Rajika and Anupam Puri
Leslie and David Puth
The Tony Randall Theatrical Fund
Leslie and David Puth
The Tony Randall Theatrical Fund
Susan and Peter Restler
Jill Rosenberg
Robert and Anna Marie Shapiro
Sandra and Steven Schoenbart
Jeremy T. Smith
Lisa and Mitch Solomon
Ellen Sontag-Miller and William C. Miller
Laura Speyer and Josef Goodman
Lauren and Jay Springer
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE MAJOR SUPPORTERS
Barbara Stimmel
Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund
Gayle and Jay Waxenberg
PRODUCERS CIRCLE—ASSOCIATE
($1,000 and up)
Anonymous (5)
Actors’ Equity Foundation
Ann Ash
Karim Aoun
Jackie and Jacob Baskin
Elizabeth Bass
Deborah Berke and Peter McCann
M.J. and James Berrien
Cece and Lee Black
Molly and Tom Boast
Mary Bockelmann Norris and Floyd Norris
William H. Burgess, III
Penny Brandt Jackson and Thomas Campbell Jackson
Christina and John Bransfield
Pamela Brier and Peter Aschkenasy
Deborah Buell and Charles Henry
Janel Callon
Joan and Robert Catell
Bonnie and David Covey
Susan Cowie
Jeff Cronin
Robert Currie
Ian Dickson and Reg Holloway
Ev and Lee
Ryan Fanek
Grace Freedman
Virginia Gliedman
Mara Goldstein and Ben Saltzman
Joyce Gordon and Paul Lubetkin
The Grace R. and Alan D.
Marcus Foundation
Anne and Paul Grand
Alba Greco-Garcia and Roger Garcia
Kathleen and Harvey Guion
Judy and Douglas Hamilton
Laura and Robert Hoguet
The Holiman Hackney Family Fund
Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP
Elizabeth Humes
Denise and Al Hurley
MATCHING GIFTS
Sally and Alfred Jones
Miriam Katowitz and Arthur Radin
Helen Kauder and Barry Nalebuff
Debra Kaye and Steven Horowitz
Fran Kumin
Jessie McClintock Kelly
Susan Kurz Snyder
Michael Lasky
Marion Leydier and Brooks Perlin
Dedee and Steve Lovell
Margaret Lundin
Rebecca and Stephen Madsen
Kathleen Maurer
Jeffrey and Wendy Maurer
Leslie and Jordan Mayer
Allison C. McCullough and Parker L. Krasney
Scott C. McDonald and Michael Heyward
Marlene Marko and Loren Skeist
Mimi Oka and Jun Makihara
Lori and Lee Parks
Annie Paulsen and Albert Garner
Martin Payson
Margaret and Carl Pfeiffer
Ponce Bank
Carol and Michael Reimers
David A.J. Richards
Susan and William Rifkin
Riva and Stephen Rosenfield
Joan H. Ross
Eliza and James Rossman
Judith Ruiz
Dorothy Ryan and John Leitch
Avi Sharon and Megan Hertzig Sharon
Cynthia and Thomas Sculco
Susan Sommer and Stephen A. Warnke
The Bernard and Anne Spitzer
Charitable Trust
Wendy and Tom Stephenson
Danna and Harvey Stone
Kathleen and Michael Stringer
Margaret Sullivan
Sweet Hospitality Group
Julie Taymor
Donna Zaccaro Ullman and Paul A. Ullman
Cynthia King Vance and Lee Vance
Giulia and Marc Weisman
Fran and Barry Weissler
Elena and Louis Werner
Tappan Wilder
Debra Winger
Carol Yorke and Gerard Conn
Barbara and Michael Zimmerman
Audrey Zucker
IN HONOR OF
In honor of Robert E. Buckholz
Steven and Jennifer Eisenstadt
Susan and William Rifkin
Barbara and Michael Zimmerman
In honor of Georgia Carney
Caroline Carney
In memory of Mildred Feinsilver
Steven Feinsilver
In honor of Matt Fishbein
Mary Ann and Nicholas Defeis
Michael Lasky
Ariel Zwang and Gordon Mehler
In honor of Brian Florczack
Aaron Donehue
In honor of Helen and Daisy
Jane Halsey
In honor of Jeffrey Horowitz
Maxine Isaacs
In honor of Michael Kahn
Maxine Isaacs
In memory of Timothy P. McCarthy, Jr.
Katherine McCarthy
In honor of Audrey Meyer
Peggy and Keth Anderson
Deborah Berke and Peter McCann
Susan Friedland
Shauna Holiman and Robert Hackney
Mimi Oka and Jun Makihara
Stacy Schiff and Marc de la Bruyere
Laurie Tisch
In memory of Rene G. Milet Jorquera
Rene Milet
In honor of Ned
Patricia McGuire
In honor of Evelyn and Everett Ortner
Deirdre Lawrence and Clem Labine
In memory of Leonard Polonsky
Lauren Breslow
Marion and Daniel Goldberg
Rian Masanoff
Daniel Polonsky
Marcia Riklis
Abby Scherr
Stephen Segaller
Judith Thompson
In memory of Steven Jackson Popkin
Susan Kurz
In honor of Dorothy Ryan
James Lynes
Leslie and Andrew Schultz
In honor of Maggie Siff
David Bickart
In honor of Kathleen Walsh
Gene Bernstein
Jill and Jay Bernstein
Michele and Martin Cohen
Amanda and Rob Grove Holmén
Denise And Al Hurley
Wendy and Jeff Maurer
Leslie and Jorden Mayer
Sean Walsh
The following companies have contributed through their Matching Gift Programs: If your employer has a matching gift program, please consider making a contribution to Theatre for a New Audience and making your gift go further by participating in your employer’s matching gift program.
Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation
The Hearst Corporation
PUBLIC FUNDS
International Business Machines
JP Morgan Chase
Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs are also made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE MAJOR SUPPORTERS
THE JEFFREY HOROWITZ LEGACY FUND
Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience, will retire at the end of this season. The Jeffrey Horowitz Legacy Fund has been established to celebrate his extraordinary 45 years of visionary leadership and singular accomplishments in American theatre—and especially in American productions of Shakespeare—as well as provide funds for Artistic Director-elect, Arin Arbus, to draw from to support special artistic initiatives in her first seasons. For more information, or to make a gift, please contact James Lynes, Director of Institutional Advancement, at jlynes@tfana.org
Alan Beller
The Jerome and Marlène Brody Foundation
Sally Brody
Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine
Ben Campbell and Yiba Ng
Constance Christensen
Jonathan and Jodie Donnellan
Richard Feldman
Matt Fishbein and Gail Stone
Daniel Goldberg
Michael M. Kaiser
Larry and Maria-Luisa Loeb
Catherine Maciariello
The Polonsky Foundation
The SHS Foundation
Susan Stockel
Anne and William Tatlock
Cathy Maciariello
Margo and Anthony Viscusi
Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein
Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss
SHAKESPEARE WORKS IN BROOKLYN: CULTURE, COMMUNITY, CAPITAL
Theatre for a New Audience recognizes with gratitude the following donors to Theatre for a New Audience’s Capital Campaign to support ambitious programming, access to affordable tickets and financial resiliency.
Named funds within the Capital Campaign include the Henry Christensen III Artistic Opportunity Fund, the Audrey H. Meyer New Deal Fund and the Merle Debuskey Studio Fund . Other opportunities include the Completing Shakespeare’s Canon Fund, Capital Reserves funds and support for the design and construction of New Office and Studio Spaces
To learn more, or to make a gift to the Capital Campaign, please contact James Lynes at jlynes@tfana.org or by calling 646-553-3886.
$1,000,000 AND ABOVE
Mr.◊ and Mrs. Henry Christensen III
Ford Foundation
The Howard Gilman Foundation
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
The Thompson Family Foundation
$250,000-$999,999
Booth Ferris Foundation
Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine
Merle Debuskey◊
Irving Harris Foundation
The Stairway Fund, Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein
◊deceased
$100,000–$249,999
Alan Jones and Ashley Garrett
Carol Sutton Lewis and William M. Lewis, Jr.
Seymour H. Lesser
The Polonsky Foundation
Charlene Magen Weinstein◊
$50,000–$99,999
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Aileen and Frank Drury
Agnes Gund
The Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund
New York State Council on the Arts
Abby Pogrebin and David Shapiro
John and Regina Scully Foundation
Marcia T. Thompson◊
$20,000–$49,999
Peggy and Keith Anderson
Elaine and Norman Brodsky
Kathy and Steve Guttman
THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES
Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation
Cynthia and Robert Schaffner
Kerri Scharlin and Peter Klosowicz
Daryl and Joy Smith
Susan Stockel
Anne and William Tatlock
Earl D. Weiner
$10,000–$19,999
Diana Bergquist
Sally R. Brody
New York State Energy Research and Development Authority
Linda and Jay Lapin
Janet Wallach and Robert Menschel◊
Alessandra and Alan Mnuchin
Anne Prost and Robert Olivier
Allison and Neil Rubler
Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch
Michael Tuch Foundation
Jackie and Josh Weisberg
$5,000–$9,999
Alan Beller
Katharine and Peter Darrow
Bipin and Linda Doshi
Marcus Doshi
Downtown Brooklyn Partnership
Susan Schultz and Thomas Faust
Barbara G. Fleischman
Jane Garnett and David Booth
Penny Brandt Jackson and Thomas Jackson
Miriam Katowitz and Arthur Radin
Mary and Howard Kelberg
Kirsten and Peter Kern
Susan Litowitz
Ronay and Richard Menschel
Ann and Conrad Plimpton
Priham Trust/The Green Family
Alejandro Santo Domingo
Marie and Mark Schwartz
Cynthia and Thomas Sculco
Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss
A 2011 Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) established a Humanities endowment fund at Theatre for a New Audience to support in perpetuity the 360° Series: Viewfinders as well as the TFANA Council of Scholars and the free TFANA Talks series. Leading matching gifts to the NEH grant were provided by Joan and Robert Arnow, Norman and Elaine Brodsky, The Durst Organization, Perry and Marty Granoff, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, John J. Kerr & Nora Wren Kerr, Litowitz Foundation, Inc., Robert and Wendy MacDonald, Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Inc., Theodore C. Rogers, and from purchasers in the Theatre’s Seat for Shakespeare Campaign, 2013-2015.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Viewfinder or the Theatre’s Humanities programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.