 |
HORIZON
Creation,
text and composition – Rinde Eckert
Direction – David Schweizer
Scenic
and Lighting Design – Alexander V. Nichols
Sound Design and Operation – Gregory T. Kuhn
Costume Design – David Zinn
Recording composition and performance – Rinde Eckert
Cast:
(in alphabetical order):
David Barlow
Rinde Eckert
Howard Swain
Company
bios
Order tickets:
Single tickets on sale May 10.
Call Telecharge.com at 212-239-6200 or 800-432-7250 or visit www.telecharge.com
Please call our box office at 212-460-5475 for additional information.
Our box office is open Tuesday - Saturday, 1:00pm-6:00pm.
Facility address:
79 East 4th Street, located between Bowery and Second Avenue in the
East Village.
Prices:
Single tickets, $50.00 each.
CheapTix Sundays, $20.00 (all tickets for all Sunday evening performances
at 7:00pm; tickets must be purchased in person, in cash at the NYTW
box office).
Student tickets, $20.00 (must be purchased in person with valid student
ID at the NYTW box office).
Description:
Rinde Eckert, a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama and the Obie
Award-winning creator of And God Created Great Whales, is renowned as
a writer, composer, director and performer whose Opera / New Music Theatre
productions have toured extensively. In Horizon, a work for three actors
loosely based on the teachings of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Eckert
plays Reinhart Poole, an unconventional theologian and teacher of ethics
at a seminary. Reinhart, who has been pressured to resign by dogmatic
powers within his church, works all night on his last lecture. He also
talks with his wife, argues with the ghost of his brother, remembers
conversations, and indulges his hobby: writing a comic allegory about
two ageless masons who've been building the same church foundation for
1750 years. In story, song, movement, and music Reinhart, his family,
and his strange masons inhabit a visually brilliant landscape, a moving
and funny horizon.
Dates:
First preview, Friday, June 1, 2007; opening night, Tuesday, June 5,
2007; final performance, Sunday, July 1, 2007.
Performance
schedule:
Tuesday at 7:00pm; Wednesday – Friday at 8:00pm; Saturday at 3:00pm
and 8:00pm; Sunday at 2:00pm and 7:00pm.
Exceptions:
Monday, June 4, added 8:00pm performance
Wednesday, June 6, no performance
Audience
Discussions:
Tuesday, June 12, post-performance
Tuesday, June 19, post-performance
Running
time:
approximately one hour and 30 minutes with no intermission
About
the artists:
Rinde Eckert
is a composer, writer, performer and director. His Opera / New Music
Theatre productions have toured throughout America, and to major festivals
in Europe and Asia. He began his career as a writer/performer in the
1980’s, writing librettos for composer Paul Dresher. Working subsequently
with choreographers Margaret Jenkins and Sarah Shelton Mann, Eckert
began composing dance scores, including the evening-length Woman,
Window, Square for The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. With the
creation of his homage to Dante The Gardening of Thomas D in
1992, performed on tour in America and France, Eckert began composing
and performing his own music/theater pieces. Recent work includes the
Obie Award winning And God Created Great Whales (2001) produced
by The Foundry Theatre; Highway Ulysses (2003) and Orpheus
X (2006), both produced and commissioned by American Repertory
Theatre; Horizon, a play with music and song (2005); and An Idiot
Divine, an evening of two one-act solo operas. He wrote the libretto
and sings in Steven Mackey’s oratorio Dream House, wrote
and directed Sound Stage by Paul Dresher for the chamber ensemble
Zeitgeist, and wrote and narrated the spoken text of Sandhills Reunion,
a concert and recording with composer Jerry Granelli. Eckert has composed
three CD’s of songs: Finding My Way Home, Do The Day Over,
and Story In Story Out. Performance engagements in 2007 include
Slow Fire with Paul Dresher / San Francisco; lead singer in
Alternate Visions, a techno-opera / Montreal; Dream House
with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project / Boston; An Idiot Divine
/ Fort Worth; Orpheus X / Scotland’s Edinburgh International
Festival, and Horizon / on a national tour. Rinde Eckert’s
work has been produced by ART, The Foundry Theatre, Center Stage in
Baltimore, Culture Project, Dobama Theatre Company and Berkeley Repertory
Theater, and has been directed by Robert Woodruff, Tony Taccone, Richard
ET White, Ellen McLaughlin and David Schweizer. He has received two
Critics Circle Awards and two Isadora Duncan Awards in San Francisco,
an Obie Award and two Drama Desk Award Nominations in New York, and
Boston’s Eliot Norton Award for Best Production by a Large Resident
Company. He received the 2005 Marc Blitzstein Award given by The American
Academy of Arts and Letters to a lyricist / librettist, and in 2007
became a Guggenheim Fellow. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
in Drama for Orpheus X. Rinde Eckert has taught at Princeton
University and is the 2008 Granada Artist-in-Residence at the University
of California at Davis. He lives in New York with his wife, Ellen McLaughlin,
the playwright and actress.
David
Schweizer has been directing and developing innovative new
theater, performance and opera works for over thirty years both nationally
and internationally. He emerged from Yale Drama School to make his New
York debut at Lincoln Center for impresario Joseph Papp in 1974 with
a radical re-imagining of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida starring
the young Christopher Walken. This led to other world premieres by notable
American playwrights such as Sam Shepard (Geography of a Horsedreamer),
Ronald Tavel (The Last Days of British Honduras), Dennis Reardon
(Siamese Connections) and many others in New York and at regional
theaters such as the Yale Repertory Theater. During this early career
period David also created an alternate young company at the Williamstown
Theatre Festival which developed new work and toured, premiering works
by Len Jenkin, Richard Nelson, John Ford Noonan, Michael Weller, Irene
Fornes and David Mamet. It was also at this point that he directed his
first opera, Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio, a notable
success at Houston Grand Opera. In 1979, he was invited to Los Angeles
to direct a play at the Mark Taper Forum and was subsequently invited
to stay on as a staff director and to initiate a new play program there.
From this alternate base in California Schweizer forged collaborations
with other experimental theater troupes including Mabou Mines for whom
he directed a multimedia piece called It's a Man's World which
opened the new Los Angeles Theatre Center. At this time Schweizer's
work began to fuse the impulses of text-based theater and more formally
radical works, and he was invited to work in eastern Europe where he
spent several years working at national theaters in Poland, the Czech
Republic, Hungary, and also touring American-based works extensively.
In the last decade, Schweizer has begun to somewhat specialize in music-driven
theater events, often classic grand operas but sometimes other more
experimental pieces. His production of Rinde Eckert's And God Created
Great Whales was an OBIE Award winner in New York and has toured
with great success finally playing the Barbican Center in London. At
Long Beach Opera, he has mounted such notable productions as Henry Purcell's
Indian Queen (in a new adaptation by Guillermo Gomez-Peña),
Thomas Ades' provocative modern opera Powder Her Face and Henze's Elegy
for Young Lovers. Now again based primarily in New York, David Schweizer
continues to pursue a life in the theatrical arts that encompasses any
and all forms that interest him. Last season off Broadway he directed
a broad farce about race relations -White Chocolate, a poetic
reverie by Charles Mee - Wintertime, and a song cycle featuring
one lyricist and eighteen different composers - Songs from an Unmade
Bed.
Horizon
was co-commissioned by the Lied Center for Performing Arts, a unit of
the University of Nebraska; the Mondavi Center at the University of
California, Davis; the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University
of Maryland; and Arts & Cultural Programming at Montclair State
University, New Jersey. The world premiere was October 28, 2005 at the
Johnny Carson Theatre at the University of Nebraska Lied Center in Lincoln.
click
here to go back to the home page |
|
