Press Release and press contact
PRESS CONTACT:
John Wyszniewski
Everyman Agency
JOHN@EVERYMANAGENCY.COM
HTTPS://WWW.EVERYMANAGENCY.COM
For Immediate Release
August 26, 2019
LA MAMA PRESENTS WORLD PREMIERE OF PAUL DAVID YOUNG’S ALL MY FATHERS, DIRECTED BY OBIE-WINNER EVAN YIONOULIS, OCTOBER 3–20
Playwright’s Elderly Mother Declares Him a Bastard, Uprooting Family and Fatherhood in the Christian South
Cast Includes Richard Gallagher, Brian Hastert, Deborah Hedwall, and Tony nominee Jonathan Hogan
La MaMa Presents
All My Fathers
Written by Paul David Young
Directed by Evan Yionoulis
October 3–20; Thursday–Saturday at 8pm, Sundays at 5pm
Opening: October 6 at 5pm
La MaMa Downstairs (66 E 4th Street)
Tickets: $30 ($25students/seniors) plus $1 facility fee
lamama.org; 212-352-3101; 90 minutes with no intermission
La MaMa is proud to present the world premiere of All My Fathers, a new tragicomedy by Paul David Young (Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal; Clown Play; In the Summer Pavilion) that centers on the life-changing declaration by Young’s elderly mother that he is the bastard son of the family pediatrician. This surreal, seemingly scripted disclosure instantly rewrites the playwright’s devoutly Christian, Southern upbringing. Young, whose life had suddenly turned hyperbolically dramatic, incorporates text from both obscure and well-known family plays such as The Seagull, Oedipus, Well,The Strange Discovery, and All My Sons. Directed by Obie-winner Evan Yionoulis (He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, Ohio State Murders), All My Fathers runs October 3–20 at La MaMa Downstairs (66 E 4th St) with an opening set for October 6. All My Fathers is produced in association with Tony-winner Deborah Green (Hadestown).
Young, who won the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award in 2009, has created a body of work that pairs an experimental approach to storytelling and language with an emotionally rich experience for audiences. His work spans art gallery environments, like MoMA PS1, to Off-Off Broadway. All My Fathers is Young’s most autobiographical work to date, yet the text has been artfully assembled from existing literature.
“When my life suddenly became a play, I knew the only way I could make sense of it all was through the communal experience of theater,” says Young. “My work has always had a strong political and social point of view. In All My Fathers, I’m using these bizarre events in my own life to explore the ideas of family and fatherhood alongside the charade of conservative Christianity in the South.”
The cast for All My Fathers will be Richard Gallagher* (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) as David, Brian Hastert* (Tectonic Theatre Project’s Uncommon Sense, The TEAM’s Mission Drift)as Dr. Woodman, Deborah Hedwall* (Sight Unseen, The Fall to Earth ) as Regina, and Tony nominee Jonathan Hogan* (As Is, Burn This) as Bill. All My Fathers is an Equity Approved Showcase. *These actors appear courtesy of the Actor’s Equity Association.
The distinguished creative team includes two-time Tony winner Donald Holder (lighting design), Ao Li (set design), Teresa Snider-Stein (costume design), and Melissa Friedling (video and sound design).
Twelve performances of All My Fathers will take placeOctober 3–20 at La MaMa Downstairs, located at 66 E 4th Street. Critics are welcome as of October 4 for an opening on Sunday, October 6. General admission tickets, which are pricedat $30 ($25 students/seniors) plus $1 facility fee, are availableat lamama.org and by calling OvationTix at 212-352-3101. The first ten tickets to every performance are available for $10. The anticipated running time is 90 minutes with no intermission.
Talkbacks will be held following select performances. On Friday, October 4, painter Jane Fine discusses her 2018 discovery of paternal identity, which informed her exhibition at Pierogi Gallery in New York. On Sunday, October 6, Prof. Nara B. Milanich, author of Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father(Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2019) discusses her study of the social, cultural, and political nature of paternity and the evolution of science in pursuit of the paternal mystery.
About the cast
Richard Gallagher( David) Broadway: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,1984, The Front Page, The Lyons,The Importance of Being Earnest, Other NY credits include: The Pearl (Major Barbara), WP Theater, Lark Theatre, 59E59 Theaters. Selected regional credits include: Actors Theatre of Louisville (Angels in America parts 1 & 2), McCarter Theatre, Studio Theatre (Tribes), Baltimore Centerstage, Yale Repertory Theatre and The Norman Conquests at Northern Stage, Dorset Theatre Festival (directed by Evan Yionoulis) and Weston Playhouse. Film: Naked Singularity (with John Boyega & Olivia Cooke), El Camino (with Elisabeth Moss). TV: Recurring roles in Orange Is the New Black and Turn: Washington’s Spies. Other television: Blacklist, Quantico, Chicago P.D., Person of Interest, Blue Bloods, Law & Order, As the World Turns, Looking for Kathleen, Wallflowers. MFA, Yale School of Drama.
Brian Hastert (Dr. Woodman): Recent stage credits include the New York premier of Tectonic Theatre Project’s Uncommon Sense, Of Good Stock (Manhattan Theatre Company), Mission Drift (The National Theatre, London), A Future Perfect (SpeakEasy, World Premier), The Ragged Claws (Cherry Lane), as well readings/workshops at New Dramatists, The Lark, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Dixon Place, The Working Theatre, The Living Theatre, Terra Nova, and others. TV: Happy!, The Deuce, The Good Wife, Allegiance, Flesh and Bone, I love You… But I Lied, The Vampire Leland(pilot). Film: Walk With Me (upcoming). Radio: Twelve Years (BBC4). Brian is a founding member of The TEAM, a Brooklyn-based theater ensemble under the artistic directorship of Tony award-winning director Rachel Chavkin. With The TEAM, Brian has helped create seven original works and created roles in Mission Drift, Particularly in the Heartland, and others. https://www.brianhastert.com/
Deborah Hedwall (Regina) has been acting, teaching and directing in New York and Los Angeles for over 25 years. She received her professional acting training with Sanford Meisner and Uta Hagen. Hedwall has created many roles in new plays On and Off Broadway, including the original production of Sight Unseenat Manhattan Theater Club for which she received an OBIE award and a Drama Desk Nomination for Outstanding Performance. Other NY productions include Savage in Limbo at New York Stage and Film, Extremities at the Westside Arts Theater, and Horton Foote’s Blind Date at Ensemble Studio Theater. Regionally she has worked at The Actor’s Theater of Louisville, The Eugene O’Neill Theater Conference, The Arena Stage, The New Play Festival at Sundance, The Long Wharf Theater, Yale Repertory, and Baltimore Center Stage where she appeared in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf directed by Ethan McSweeny. Since then she has worked at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor in Men's Lives(directed by Harris Yulin), at Barrington Stage in Breaking the Code (directed by Joe Calarco), and at Hartford Stage in Christopher Shinn's new play An Opening in Time (directed by Oliver Butler). Film and Television credits include Netflix's Jessica Jones, Edward Burns’ Public Morals, Homeland, HBO's Barry Levinson's You Don't Know Jack with Al Pacino, The West Wing, Law & Order, The Big C, Delocated, and Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground. For two seasons, Deborah played the mother in the Emmy Award-winning series I’ll Fly Awaywith Regina Taylor. http://www.deborahhedwall.com/
Jonathan Hogan (Bill): Broadway - Comedians, Otherwise Engaged, Fifth of July, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, As Is (Tony and Drama Desk nominations for Best Actor), Burn This, Taking Steps, The Homecoming. Circle Rep - The Hot l Baltimore, The Mound Builders, Balm in Gilead (in collaboration with Steppenwolf – Drama Desk Award for Best Ensemble). Other performances Off Broadway include Book of Days, Molly Sweeney, London Wall, Pocatello (2015 Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor), Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold Onto Me Darling (Lucille Lortel Award nominee for Outstanding Featured Actor) and Hindle Wakes. Films and TV - In Country, The House On Carroll Street, A Fish In The Bathtub,Revolution #9, several Movies of the Week, L.A. Law, Quantum Leap, all the Law & Orders, House of Cards, The Looming Tower, and Woody Allen’s yet to be released A Rainy Day in New York. Mr. Hogan is a graduate of The Goodman Theatre and School of Drama.
About the Artists
Paul David Young's 2017 Trump satire, Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal, performed by four clowns at Judson Church, was featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, Village Voice("Voice Choice"), The Wall Street Journal, and Hyperallergic.Upstage Downstagepicked his play Kentucky Cantata, at HERE in New York, as one of the top 13 plays of Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway for 2015. Erik Haagensen of Backstage selected his In the Summer Pavilionin NYCFringe and at 59e59 Theaters as a “Critic's Pick.” His No One But You won the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and was a finalist for the Kendeda Fellowship. His one-act Aporiawas a finalist for the Kennedy Center's John Cauble Short Play Award. His translations, with Carl Weber, of Heiner Müller’s Anatomy Titus Fall of Romeand Macbethwere published as Heiner Müller: After Shakespeare. A contributing editor at PAJ(MIT Press), he writes regularly for Hyperallergic. His book newARTtheatre: Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic, about visual artists appropriating theatre, was issued by PAJ in 2014. He has had residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace, Millay Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Ensemble Studio Theatre's Summer Conference. LMCC awarded him a five-month Process Space residency on Governors Island for 2015, where he conceived and performed Curtain Wall Part 3: An Immersive Landscape Theater Performance of Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, in which he swam across New York Harbor.http://www.pauldavidyoung.com
Evan Yionoulisis an award-winning director who has helmed new plays and classics in New York and across the country. She has enjoyed collaborations with major American playwrights, including Adrienne Kennedy (the critically acclaimed productions of He Brought Her Heart Back in a Boxand Ohio State Murders, Lortel Award for Best Revival, Theatre for a New Audience) and Richard Greenberg (the premieres and New York productions of The Violet Hour, Biltmore Theatre, Broadway; Everett Beekin, Lincoln Center Theatre; and Three Days of Rain, Manhattan Theatre Club, Obie Award for direction). In her twenty years as a resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre, she directed Richard II, Cymbeline, The Master Builder, George F. Walker’s Heaven, Brecht’s Galileo, Gozzi’s The King Stag (which she adapted with composer Mike Yionoulis and Catherine Sheehy), Caryl Churchill’s Owners, Guillermo Calderon’s Kiss, and numerous other productions. Credits include work at the Mark Taper Forum, Huntington, NY Shakespeare Festival, the Vineyard, Cherry Lane, 2econd Stage, American Music Theatre Festival, Dallas Theatre Center, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Williamstown, Denver Center, Portland Stage, PlayMakers Rep, and many others. She directed SEVEN, a documentary theatre piece about extraordinary women from across the globe who work for human rights, in New York, Boston, Washington, Aspen, London, Deauville, and New Delhi. She serves on the Executive Board of SDC, the labor union representing stage directors and choreographers as Secretary and is a Princess Grace Foundation Awards recipient.She is the Richard Rodgers Director of the Drama Division at the Juilliard School.
Donald Holder (lighting design) is an American lighting designer in theater, opera, and dance based in New York. He has been nominated for thirteen Tony Awards, winning the 1998 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design as well as the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lighting Design for The Lion King. He won a second Tony in 2008 for the revival of South Pacific. His lighting design for Ragtime was nominated for a 2010 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Musical. Additional Broadway credits include: Big Fish, Annie(2012 Broadway revival), Golden Boy, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Arcadia, The Motherf**cker With The Hat, Promises, Promises, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Radio Golf, The Little Dog Laughed, Movin' Out, The Times They Are a-Changin', A Streetcar Named Desire, Holiday,Cyrano de Bergerac, Prelude to a Kiss, M. Butterfly, Straight White Men, Kiss Me, Kate, Anastasia, Oslo, Tootsie, and The Father. He was the theatrical lighting designer for seasons one and two of the NBC-Universal television series Smash.
Ao Li (set design) is a set designer and visual artist that has worked internationally. His designs include: Scraps(Flea Theatre), Real(The Tank), As You Like It(Columbia University), Waiting for Godot(Alfred University), Lucretia(Cantata Profana), Where is My Maple Town(Theatre Row), Kiss(Yale Repertory Theatre), ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore(Yale School of Drama), Titus Andronicus(Iseman Theatre), Yale Cabaret credits include: The Apple Tree, Xander Xyst, Dragon:1 and The Styx Songs. His work in Shanghai include: Cao Zhi (Academy Theatre), Blind (Shanghai International Arts Festival), Everything in the Garden (Duanjun Theatre) among others. Li associate designed Soft Power(The Public Theatre), The Orphan of Zhaoat Beijing Poly Theater and assisted on productions including Judgement Day(Park Avenue Armory), The Twilight Zone(West End), Tamerlano(Frankfurt Opera), Le Nozze Di Figaro(Theatre Des Champs-Elysses) and Scenes From Court Life(Yale Repertory Theater) etc. http://aoliarts.com/
Teresa Snider-Stein(costume design) is a twenty-five year veteran of New York and Regional theatre, has designed costumes for nearly a hundred productions. Selected credits include: I’m not Rappaport (Broadway & regional tour); Everett Beekin (Lincoln Center); the original productions of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Young Man from Atlanta, (Signature Theatre, Huntington Theatre, and Alley Theatre); Raised in Captivity,(Vineyard Theater and South Coast Rep); and 36 Views (Huntington Theatre, Boston, MA). For nine years as the resident costume designer at Signature Theatre in New York City, Ms. Snider-Stein particularly enjoyed the intensive yearlong collaboration with the various playwrights in residence. She designed the costumes for over thirty-five productions by Romulus Linney, Lee Blessing, Edward Albee, Horton Foote, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Sheppard, Arthur Miller, John Guare, and Maria Irene Fornes. Working directly with each of the playwrights she was able to focus on specificity of character and tap into each author’s particular point of view. Through participation in this in-depth exploration of individual playwrights’ work, she was part of the team that helped cement the Signature Theatre’s playwright-centric techniques.
Melissa Friedling (video and sound design) is a filmand video artist, writer, and commercial web video producer. Her creative work has been selected for numerous international festivals and has also been presented in galleries and museums including PS1 MoMA, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, The Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, and Apex Art. She has been an artist in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program and is the recipient of a Fulbright Award and artist’s grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts. In 2006, she also founded her own web video production company, Slouch Productions. In addition, her writing on film, art, and culture has been published widely including essays in Flash Art International, Afterimage, and Discourse and a book, Recovering Women: Rhetoric, Feminisms, and Addiction (Westview Press, 2000).
About La MaMa
La MaMa is dedicated to the artist and all aspects of the theatre. La MaMa's vision of nurturing new artists and new work remains as strong today as it was when Ellen Stewart first opened the doors in 1961. La MaMa has presented more than 5,000 productions by 150,000 artists of all nations, cultures, races, and identities. Cultural pluralism and ethnic diversity are inherent in the work created on our stages. Here, artists find a supportive environment for artistic exploration, and audiences are part of the development of an artist’s work over time.
A recipient of the 2018 Regional Theater Tony Award, and more than 30 Obie Awards and dozens of Drama Desk, Bessie, and Villager Awards, La MaMa has been a creative home for thousands of artists, many of whom have made lasting contributions to the arts, including Blue Man Group, Peter Brook, Ping Chong, André DeShields, Harvey Fierstein, Tadeusz Kantor, Adrienne Kennedy, Diane Lane, Warren Leight, Michael Mayer, Bette Midler, Meredith Monk, Kazuo Ohno, David and Amy Sedaris, Julie Taymor, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.
Media Contact: John Wyszniewski at Everyman Agency, john@everymanagency.com, 347-416-3881.
###