Events

 SHOWDOWN

Gerald W. Lynch Theater November 29&30, 2022

An explosive evening of theatre where actors go head to head and toe to toe to find and bring home the truth

Written and Directed by Richard Hoehler

past events

FESTIVAL

working class in prison

Miss Evers's Boys

Why today many are fearful of getting the COVID 19 Vaccination?

Our second Acting Out production on Zoom with additional performances on December 6 at 3PM, December 12 at 8PM, and December 13 at 3PM. Written by incarcerated men and performed by formerly incarcerated actors, INSIDE OUT is comprised of eleven compelling scenes interlaced with letters to home and spoken word poetry. The evening avoids clichéd and exploitive television tropes and gives you a candid and uncensored look at life on the inside from men who have been there. At times moving, at times absurd, INSIDE OUT entertains, educates and enlightens.

Acting Out production

Troy Too

A new, short play for reading, teaching, experiencing, and remembering, inspired by The Trojan Women, tells a communal story of Covid-19, climate change and Black Lives Matter in New York City, 2020.

Karen Malpede's Troy Too will be included as the only American offering in the international anthology Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics and Global Crises, edited by Avra Sidiropoulou, to be published by Routledge in 2021.

Theater Three Collaborative and Avra's Persona Theater, Athens, will create an animated version of the text, with an international cast of actors' voices, and art by Biba Kayewich, for distribution on-line. If so moved, you may donate to our effort on the link below.

Greek tragedy was created to help citizens of democracy confront and heal from the traumas of their age. More than any other Greek tragedy, The Trojan Women gives lyric voice to the victims. Troy Too is written in this tradition of bearing witness. Using found and invented language, it honors the experience of those who suffer, in order to confront injustice, to remember and to heal.

Troy Too may be downloaded now by clicking The Typescript where it is published online.

Other Than We is also available for free viewing at the Columbia Earth Institute and for order at Laertes Books.

With thanks to our individual donors and to the Wilborn Trust, Puffin Foundation, Henning and Julia Hoesch, and In Memory of Doris Isgrig

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RHINOCEROS

By Ionesco

Directed by Roxane Revon

& Scenography by Nicolas Saint Gregoire

This play, written in 1959, is often read as a response and criticism to the upsurge of Fascism the events preceding World War II, and explores the themes of conformity, culture, responsibility, logic, mass movements, mob mentality, philosophy, and morality.

Over the course of three acts, Ionesco shows us how the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town will turn into rhinoceroses. Ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is initially criticized in the play for his drinking, tardiness, and lifestyle and then, later, for his increasing paranoia and obsession with the rhinoceroses.

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PAST EVENTS:

FALL 2018

ASS PLAYS

Written by Steven Fechter & the ALAT Company

Directed by Vernice Miller & Kevaughn Harvey

ASS Perf

SPRING 2018

DON JUAN

Play by Molière

Directed by Roxane Revon

Don Juan is a tragicomedy written by the famous French playwright and actor Molière, and performed in five acts in 1665. Based on the legend of Don Juan, the play follows the actions of a libertine in Sicily. Don Juan is a wealthy nobleman who romances ever pretty young woman he meets regardless of their status and despite moral values. He offers them marriage, even going so far as to marry a different woman every month. Moliere’s play shows Don Juan as a rationalist atheist who values the power of reason and dismiss the fear linked to religious faith. After fifteen performances the play was withdrawn from the stage and published in its full version only after the French Revolution, in 1813.

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FALL 2017

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

Gerald W. Lynch Theater

Play by Arthur Miller

Directed by Lorraine Moller

A View from the Bridge is an absorbing, domestic drama set near the loading docks in Brooklyn’s Italian Red Hook Community in the 1950s. Miller breathes life into Eddie, a longshoreman whose unacknowledged passion for his 17-year-old niece results in a drama of classic proportion. When his wife’s cousins, Marco and Rodolpho enter the country illegally to find work, tension erupts as Katie love for Rodolpho grows and Eddie tries to put a stop to the relationship. Themes of masculinity, culture, obsession, loyalty, betrayal and shame emerge as the community witnesses his downfall.

A View

Channel THIRTEEN Broadcasts

DRAMATIC ESCAPE

Tuesday, June 13 at 9:30 pm

Documentary Film Follows RTA Production of A Few Good Men Behind the Bars at Sing Sing

THIRTEEN, New York’s local PBS station, will air the broadcast premiere of Dramatic Escape, a feature-length documentary, on Tuesday June 13 at 9:30PM, with an additional airing on Thursday June 15 at 3AM. WLIW/CHANNEL 21 will also broadcast the film on Sunday June 25 at 10:30PM, with an additional airing on Friday June 30 at 2:30AM.

Dramatic Escape transports viewers into the lives of maximum-security prisoners mounting a stage production of A Few Good Men at Sing Sing, The production is part of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, which teaches theater, dance, writing, visual arts and music in five New York State prisons and dramatically reduces recidivism rates among RTA participants. The film is co-produced by RTA and Goldcrest Films and the play within the film is directed by John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Lorraine Moller.

Viewers get an intimate look inside prison as the film traces the men's steps from auditions through curtain call. Along the way, prisoners reveal their personal stories, their everyday struggles, and contemplate whether redemption is possible. Dramatic Escape was the winner of the top award at the 2016 (In)Justice For All Film Festival in Chicago and was featured at the festival’s opening ceremony.

DRAMATIC ESCAPE TRAILER

SPRING 2017

THE AFRICAN COMPANY PRESENTS RICHARD III

Come meet the courageous folks who, in apost-revolutionary America full of slavesand slavery,

launched the first black theatre company and experience the violent push back they endured

Richard III

FALL 2016

The Department of Communication and Theatre Arts is proud to present "Love and information" by Caryl Churchill, directed by Prof. Roxane Revon and performed by John Jay students. The show is presented at The Black Box Theatre, on November 16th to 18th at 7pm and 21st during community hour.

Through a series of tantalizing vignettes, chameleonic actors will embody more than 100 characters – a child who cannot feel pain, a man in love with a computer voice, a woman with a secret. Like a single beam of light refracted, each scene exposes a different facet of human nature.

Churchill’s Love and Information is an exhilarating experience, creating a theatrical kaleidoscope that questions how connected we truly are in this ever-connected age.

Roxane Revon, Director of the Play

Love and Information

SPRING 2016

The play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 centers around the community response to the beating of Rodney King, as captured on a videotape that went viral following the acquittal of four LAPD officers. The beating may have only been a catalyst to the riots that followed. Other tensions in the community had simmered to the surface, such as racism, classism, greed and hostility to the upwardly mobile immigrant class of Koreans, inciting a riot that resulted in retributive violence in one of the worst race riots in United States history.

On March 3, 1991, Rodney King became the face of police brutality in America. The problem of police brutality against people of color, predominately African Americans, persists today as evidenced by the much publicized cases of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Timothy Thomas, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo, to name just a few.

Lorraine Moller, Director of the Play