NYTW 2024 Summer Residencies

Our Artistic team just wrapped the second summer residency of the season! The annual summer residencies at Adelphi University and Dartmouth College are an integral part of our developmental opportunities for new works. These residencies support artists by providing an opportunity to focus on their work away from the demands of everyday life, to create and share collaborative spaces with others, and to engage with theatre students and faculty at both universities.

These residencies provide support in and out of the rehearsal room, ensuring to nurture the sense of belonging through organized field trips, community meals, and gatherings.

During our time, we hosted our annual 2050 Artistic Fellowship retreat and we were thrilled to invite returning artists and welcome new ones to our artistic community to develop theatrical projects. While they both differ in nature, location, and format—the common factor between Dartmouth and Adelphi is that they are restorative, artistically and communally.

And now that we’re back, we’re happy to uplift these projects and artists! We’re immensely grateful to have had the chance to be in community with all these remarkable artists, and to spend time with them in their day-to-day. We look forward to all the ways we can continue to foster the relationships built and the magical artistry that was created away from the city.

2050 Artistic Fellows Retreat

2023/24 Outgoing Fellows:
Andrea Ambam (solo performer)
Celeste Jennings (playwright)
Ying Ying Li (playwright)
Emily Abrams (director)
Raz Golden (director)
Nicholas Polonio (director)

2024/25 Incoming Fellows:
Derick Edgren Otero (playwright)
Nikki Massoud (playwright)
Andres Santiago Piña (playwright)
Danica Selem (director)
Christie Zhao (director)

Adelphi Week One: June 10–14, 2024

CAMP!
By Emily Abrams
Dramaturgy by Alexa Derman
Sound Design by Ryan Gamblin
With Cricket Brown, Arnie Burton, Major Curda and Nate Miller

It’s 1983 and Angelica, a quiet 14 year old girl with a secret, goes away to Camp. While her shy tendencies land her on the bottom of the social totem-pole, her cousin Ryan courageously fends off bullies. When each of Angelica’s tormentors winds up dead, Angelica fears that her secret will be unveiled. Or, rather, untucked. 

This horror-comedy satirizes the classic killer-tranny trope, and asks the question, “Would you wanna be in a bathroom with HER?”

No. You wouldn’t.
Cuz she’s going to Slay you. 
No literally…
Like. You will be slain.

KRISTINA WONG, #FOODBANKINFLUENCER
Written and Performed by Kristina Wong
Directed by Jessica Hanna

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Kristina Wong is a real life food bank influencer in Los Angeles who brings glamour and pizazz to the emergency food system like nobody asked for. Her new work takes us through America’s food insecurity issues from big cities to the Navajo Nation. Peppered with Karaoke songs with her original lyrics, Kristina will help us to look at the future of emergency food. If food banks were originally a stop gap for a temporary crisis and now have become a permanent part of American survival, does this mean we are in a perpetual state of crisis?

THE ELEPHANT IS VERY LIKE
Written by Ankita Raturi
Directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar
Choreographed by Alpa Shah Basu
With Pernashee Dave, Kedarnath Havaldar, Avanthika Srinivasan and Rhea Yadav

When we speak, whose language are we speaking? What language can we call our own? The one-act play The Elephant Is Very Like tells the story of a woman who cannot say any words that have not been spoken to her, and a man who tries and fails and tries again to help her. Together, they reach for multilingual poetry, prose, images and the South Asian dance form kathak in their pursuit of a language of her own. 

BABE LINCOLN
Written and Performed by Ellie MacPherson
Directed by Elizabeth Bennett

A musical comedy show by Abraham Lincoln (if he had written one). You thought winning the Civil War was hard, try writing a solo hour.

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
Daniel and Patrick Lazour
Residency Project: We Live in Cairo

Adelphi Week Two: June 16–20, 2024

COWBOY BOB
Music & Lyrics by Jeanna Phillips
Book & Additional Lyrics by Molly Beach Murphy
Directed by Annie Tippe

You wouldn’t look twice at Peggy Jo. She’s a good daughter, always tips, plays by the rules – but when she dons a fake mustache, sunglasses, and ten-gallon hat, she becomes “Cowboy Bob”- the slickest bank robber Texas has ever known. Inspired by actual events, this world-premiere musical tells the story of one of the FBI’s most unusual suspects through the eyes of a chain-restaurant waitress desperate to buck her flavorless life and awaken to all that’s possible. With a genre-bending score that shifts from country to punk to folk & indie rock, Cowboy Bob is a defiant rejection of the status quo, inviting audiences to take life by the reins, join the heist, & let it ride.

FEAST OF GHOSTS
Written by Murielle Borst-Tarrant and Safe Harbors NYC
Stage Managed by Andrew Aaron Valdez
With Nic Billey, Kimberly JaJuan, Bradley Lewis, Jayden-Avery Love, Chingwe Padraig Sullivan and Darylina Powderface

Feast of Ghosts is a Felliniesque ghost story in four tales representing the four directions, four narratives, four directors and one master director overseeing all. The piece is created for the outdoors that is a circus or a pageant, with characters suspended between earth and sky. In the wake of COVID-19, Native communities and individuals across the nation have been disproportionately impacted by the virus. Safe Harbors NYC ensemble and administration lost a founding ensemble member, husband, father and relative to the virus in spring 2020, Kevin Tarrant. Our company asked ourselves how do we artistically mourn? Muriel asked herself how do I mourn and complete Kevin and my last collaborative project.

¡HARKEN!
Written and Performed by Modesto Flako Jimenez
Directed by Victor Morales
Production Manager Nzingha Primus
Technical Artist Ker Chen

¡Harken! is an immersive experience that guides Audiences through the few pages of history written about Juan Rodriguez. Also referred to as Jan Rodrigues, he was a black or mulatto free man from Saint Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) who traded fur in 1609 for Dutch captain Thijs Volckenz Mossel, the commander of the Jonge Tobias ship exploring North America for Its economic potential after the Henry Hudson exploration. Take in Rodrigues’s and New York City layered history brought together thought poetry, Artificial Intelligence, and storytelling, offering a look into humanity’s intermingling of races and ethnicities and new technologies that makes us question – who gets to author those stories?

ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
Kareem Fahmy
Residency Project: Riparian States

Dartmouth Week One: July 29–August 4, 2024

ALAA: A FAMILY TRILOGY
PLAY II: MINI REVOLUTIONARIES
By Adam Ashraf Elsayigh
Directed by Shadi Ghaheri
With Sara Haider, Noor Hamdi, Pooya Mohseni, Sanjit De Silva, Rita Wolf and Awesta Zarif

In 2011, blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah gained prominence by fusing his activism and tech acumen, making him one of the Egyptian Revolution’s leading youth voices. But Abd El-Fattah has spent much of the last decade in Cairo’s prisons, unlawfully imprisoned by the state’s resurgent military regime in an attempt to silence him… to destroy his spirit and mind. Juxtaposing physical storytelling and projections with Abd El-Fattah’s testimonials and interviews we conducted with Alaa’s family matriarchs, ALAA: A Family Trilogy is a historical epic dramatizing the Egyptian Revolution and the military coup to follow, through the life of Egypt’s most prolific political prisoner and the family he came from.

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
Ryan Drake
Residency Project: b-19

Danielle Stagger
Residency Project: Untitled

Aileen Wen McGroddy & Gui Duvignau
Residency Project: The Magic Flute

Dartmouth Week Two: August 5–August 11, 2024

QUITTER ON THE WAY TO THE DITCH
Written & Performed by Sharon Mashihi
Directed by Katie Brook
Sound Design by Chris Giarmo

An artist has spent her entire career telling and retelling audiences stories about herself. All the while, in her personal life, she has lost relationship after relationship. On this night, in this theater, the artist shows up in front of her audience with a new fear: What if the next relationship to go is the one she has with them, her audience? Can she save this relationship before it’s too late? Can her audience help her? What ensues is a performance about love, work, codependency, how to live a life without regret, what to do with all the regrets you’ve already amassed, and the central question of how much control we actually have over our own life story.

LUPE FINDS ME IN THE GARDEN OF DREAMS
By Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel
Directed by Adin Walker
Movement Direction by Ogemdi Ude
With Lawrence Henry, Samora la Perdida and Jeena Yi

Estrella is a young Trans Latina writer at a spiritual crossroads, navigating heartbreak, gender dysphoria, and artistic failure in America. She becomes the Old Hollywood actress Lupe Velez on the last night of her life to find the answers to her questions, and the two people who hold them are Anna May Wong and Gary Cooper, her lifetime’s greatest relationships. ‘lupe finds me in the garden of dreams’ spans years in cinematic history to raise the questions: what are the costs to being a queer artist of color in today’s industry? What would happen if we found a way of creating ourselves and our work outside of it?”

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
Dale Soules
Residency Project: developing new work based on autobiographical stories

N’yomi Stewart
Residency Project: SOMEWHERE BETWEEN

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Categories: Behind the Scenes. Tags: 2050 Artistic Fellows.