AMERICAN STORY PROJECT THEATER COMPANY INC

BROOKLYN, New York, 11215 United States

Mission Statement

THE ASSEMBLY is a collective of multi-disciplinary performance artists committed to realizing a visceral and intelligent theater for a new generation. Assembly members unite varied perspectives in service of wide-reaching, unabashedly theatrical and rigorously researched ensemble performances, crafted to spark conversation with our audiences. Our work embraces the complexities of our present moment; it is a call for empathy and engagement. Embracing collaboration as the core of the creative process, the company chooses projects through consensus and develops text, action and design side-by-side within the rehearsal environment. From workshops to productions to post-performance discussions, The Assembly is dedicated to rooting its artists, audiences, and peers in a profound sense of community.

About This Cause

Holding firm to the belief that history repeats itself, The Assembly's projects look to the past to make sense of the present moment. The company's first project, We Can’t Reach You, Hartford, examined the company's understanding of the events of September 11th through the lens of the catastrophic Barnum & Bailey circus fire of 1944. The play premiered at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it was nominated for the coveted Fringe First Award. Later projects have explored topics such as the crisis of speculative capitalism in the Gold Rush and the Dot-Com Boom (Clementine and the Cyber Ducks) and the radical politics of the Weather Underground in HOME/SICK, which earned a New York Times and Backstage Critics' Pick, and was revived by undergroundzero festival, Wesleyan University, The Living Theater, and The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles. Our most recent season began with That Poor Dream, an exploration of how class and race shape identity in contemporary America with a text freely adapted from Charles Dickens’ classic novel Great Expectations. That Poor Dream premiered at The New Ohio Theatre in Oct 2014 and returned to The Tank in January 2015 as part of its curated Flint & Tinder series. The Assembly was granted the highly selective Archive Residency for 2015-2016, where we developed the second play in our season, I Will Look Forward to This Later—an inter-generational meditation on aging—that premeired at the New Ohio Theater in April of 2016. We premiered the third play in our season, SEAGULLMACHINE, a radical hybrid of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull and Heiner Müller's hamletmachine, set site-specifically in La MaMa's historic Ellen Stewart Theatre. A feature article about the company's work and process by Cindy Rosenthal was published in the Fall 2016 issue of The Drama Review under the title "Circling Up with The Assembly: A Theatre Collective Comes of Age." We have been developing our singular collaborative style since 2006 and working formally as The Assembly since 2008.

AMERICAN STORY PROJECT THEATER COMPANY INC
Po Box 150240
BROOKLYN, New York 11215
United States
Phone 347 562 1206
Unique Identifier 743174596