Roger Babb
ROGER BABB was for many years a playwright / director with Otrabanda Company. He worked as an actor for Joseph Chaikin, Jim Neu, Julie Taymor, Merideth Monk and many others. He taught at Princeton, NYU, Swarthmore and most recently at Mt Holyoke College.
By Roger Babb
Director Katherine Brook and playwright Liza Birkenmeier have crafted successful careers as experimental theater artists in New York City. Birkenmeier is a member of Ars Nova Play Group and a New Georges Affiliated Artist.
On July 14, 15, and 16, The Kitchen will present three days of performances, panel discussions, and video presentations honoring the work of the great downtown theater artist Jeff Weiss and his mentor and partner Carlos Ricardo Martinez.
Oren Safdie’s newest piece, West Bank, UK, a musical on which he collaborated with composer/lyricist Robbie Cohen, is about an Israeli ex-patriot who returns to a rent-controlled apartment in London to find it occupied by a Palestinian refugee. The American landlord, unable to decide between them, suggests they try to learn to live with each other.
Kabuki, the highly stylized, spectacular theatre of Japan, has over its four hundred year history become codified, sacralized and elevated to the status of a national treasure. It has the equivalent position of Grand Opera in Italy, Kathakali in southern India, Shakespearean performance in England and perhaps the National Football League in the United States. All of these performance forms have humble origins. They were under constant constraint from civil authorities and were publicly sanctioned as a moral danger to their communities.
As Daniel Gerould, the distinguished theatre scholar has noted, melodrama was and still is a major art form in America.
This January, the Theatre of the Two Headed Calf will present their Kabuki influenced production of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara at La Mama. Co-founded by director Brooke O’Harra and composer Brian Connelly, the company has presented a number of critically well-received performance pieces over the last five years.
