One-Eighth Theater + New Ohio Theater + IRT Theater My Onliness
Director and Featuring: Daniel Irizarry Text and Lyrics: Robert Lyons (from Witkacy) Composer: Kamala Sankaram Director of American Sign Language: Alexandria Wailes and Kailyn Aaron-Lozano Creative producer: Kori Rushton With additional support from: Seoul Institute of the Arts
Featuring: Daniel Irizarry, Cynthia LaCruz, Rhys Tivey, Joanie Brittingham*, Drew Fleming, Dickie Hearts*, Malik Paris, Amelia Hensley (ICE Festival), Kamala Sankaram (ICE Festival) * member of Actors Equity Equity Approved Showcase
Stage Management: Hannah Stoffer and Emily Hart Lighting Design: Christina Tang Associate Lighting Design: Vittoria Orlando Set Design: Jungah Han Original Costume Design: James Terrell Additional Costume Design: Brittani Beresford Assist. Costume Designer (ICE Festival): Bobbi Morse Sound Engineer: Lawrence Schober Sound Design (ICE Festival): Kody Lynn Milburn Technical Director/ Associate Set Designer and Performer: Žilvinas Jonušas Show Mixer: Jack Niesi ASL Assist. Director (ICE Festival): Sienna Crafter Production Assistant (ICE Festival): Angelica Martinez
A mad King performs his royal power as an act of martyrdom, in a desperate attempt to impress a mysterious petitioner. While a Master of Ceremony orchestrates songs of torture, truth, and tenderness. (The poor Writer is simply collateral damage!) Is this a glimpse of our dystopian future? Or just the structure of human consciousness? An homage to Stanislaw Witkacy and his theories of “pure forms in theatre”. Performed with American Sign Language interpretation.
A new collaboration between Daniel Irizarry and Robert Lyons, following the international success of Yovo – NYC/Poland/Cuba.
CREATIVE TEAM
DREW FLEMING (Musician) is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer with influences ranging from hardcore punk to western swing. Drew has toured the world with punk chamber orchestra AntiSocial Music and indie-folk darlings Kaiser Cartel, while composing for and fronting his own bands Bourbon Sprawl and Bombay Ricky. Bombay Rickey’s debut album Cinephonia received the Independent Music Awards’ Vox Pop choice for Best Eclectic Album 2014, and the follow-up Electric Bhairavi garnered the Independent Music Awards Best Eclectic Album 2018. The band’s eponymous opera-cabaret, called a “rocking good show” by the Wall Street Journal, played in opera festivals in New York and London. Drew is earning a doctorate in Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has presented national conference papers, including “These Are the Voices: Improvisation, Vocality, and Critical Ambivalence in the Music of Fishbone” and is currently writing a book about a very nice sounding chord.
JUNGAH HAN (Set Design) is a New York based Set Designer in Theatre, Film, and Television. She designed an immersive theatre production, Vier Letzte Lieder by Richard Strauss at the Alchemical Studio. She has designed various styles of theatre productions including selectively Numbness: Chapter 2 (New Ohio Theatre), Shockheaded Peter, When the Rain Stops Falling (Cygnet Theatre), Coriolanus, Paradise Lost, Cardboard Piano, Measure for Measure (Yale Iseman Theatre), Solo Bach (Yale Cabaret), A Number (Cygnet Roland Theatre), and No Exit (Diversionary Theatre). She has associated and assisted several Broadway productions including Derren Brown Secret (Cort Theatre), Once On This Island (Circle in the Square Theatre, National Tour), Frankie& Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Broadhurst Theatre), Harlequinade (American Ballet Theatre), Rigoletto (Die Staatsoper Unter den Linden), and Tosca (Cincinnati Opera House). Her additional works can be found on her website, www.jungahhan.com
DICKIE HEARTS (Medium) (he/him) is a Deaf Gay BIPOC Actor and 3x national film contest winner, and currently based in New York City. His TV credits include Netflix’s Grace & Frankie (2017), Netflix’s Tales of the City (2019), and HBO’s High Maintenance (2020), and stage credits include New York Deaf Theater’s Maple & Vine and IRT’s Stepchild, Please Untranslate Me. Recently, Hearts wrote and remotely directed an ASL LGBTQ+ musical short film during the pandemic called “Disconnected: The Musical” now available for online viewing. Hearts continues to push for more Deaf LGBTQ+ and BIPOC representation onscreen.
AMELIA HENSLEY (Medium) - Broadway: Spring Awakening (Deaf West). Off Broadway: I Was Most Alive with You (Playwrights Horizons). NYC: Sylvia (NYDT), Dancing Girl (She NYC Arts), Stepchild (IRT Theater), Rape of Lucretia (New Camerata Opera). Seattle: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (12th Ave Arts), Skin (Deaf Spotlight). LA: Spring Awakening (Deaf West), Our Town (Pasadena Playhouse) Romeo and Juliet (Sontag Greek Theatre). DC: The Lady Becomes Him, (Faction of Fools), Peepshow (Dog & Pony DC), Noises Off (Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival).
DANIEL IRIZARRY (Director / My Onliness) is an international director, actor/performer and educator based in NYC. He is the Artistic Director of One-Eighth Theater. He directed YOVO written by Robert Lyons with performances at New Ohio Theatre & IRT Theater in NYC, Gardzienice International theater festival in Poland and in Ciego de Ávila, Cuba. He has directed an adaptation of Gogol's The Inspector General in NCPA performing space in Mumbai, India; directed and performed the world premiere of Yukio Mishima’s Busu for Provincetown Tennesse Williams Theatre Festival. As director and performer he is known for: The Maids by José Rivera (The New York Times Critics pick), UBU (Time Out NY Critics pick), Numbness: Chapter ' (The New Ohio & IRT Theatre Archive Residency), The Madman and The Nun'performed in Turkey (World Premiere) and Poland (Gardzienice), and NYC (Pregones Theatre), An Italian Straw Hat'(Essen, Germany), Mouthgasm Chapter 1 (Turkey and Cyprus), Momorato (Tokyo, Japan), Fragments (Vilnius, Lithuania), Chekhov’s one-act series (Seoul, South Korea) Black Water (Ciego de Ávila, Cuba International Theatre Festival) & for his performance in Piazzola’s Maria de Buenos Aires (Bare Opera at Blue Building in NYC). He has taught acting and directing all around the world (India, South Korea, Japan, Lithuania, Turkey, UK, US, Poland, Puerto Rico among other countries) and holds an MFA in Acting from Columbia University and a BA in drama from The University of Puerto Rico.
ŽILVINAS JONUŠAS (Technical Director) wears many hats while entertaining others, be it in theater, a club, on a street or on a threshold at his grandmother’s house after the potato harvest. Born in Lithuania he has acted, danced, directed, wrote, designed and built sets in his native country and abroad. He has worked as an Art and Technical Director, designed lights for theater and film and was part of crews which just made things run. When he is not creating live entertainment, he is most likely painting, writing or building something with his hands. Žilvinas holds B.F.A. in Theater and Philology from Vilnius University in Lithuania, M.A. in Media Arts and M.F.A. in New Media Art and Performance from LIU Brooklyn. His thesis Epistemologies of Death, Desire, and Disgust in the Films, The Psychological and Social Usefulness was published by VDM Verlag in 2008. His short play The Cleaning was included in The Best American Short Plays of 2006-2007. Žilvinas most recent work was seen at La MaMa, Performance Space New York, NYU Skirball and HERE Arts Center. If he sparked your interest, please visit his personal website for more information: zilvinasjonusas.com
CYNTHIA LACRUZ (Morbidita) is a Singer, Actress, and Mother who was born and raised in New York City. In 2011 she released her first Latin studio album, Borra, under Cundeamor Music in the Dominican Republic - the island from which her parents emigrated from. She performs throughout New York City with Lehman Stages’ Children’s Theatre and with Teatro SEA. Her latest theatre credits include: L'Atelier Theatre’s production of The Franca Rame Project at the Irondale Theatre for the On Women festival, and One-Eighth Theatre's Numbness: Chapter 2 for the 25th ICE Factory Festival at the New Ohio Theatre.
ROBERT LYONS (Text & Lyrics - from Witkacy) (he/him) is a playwright/director with more than twenty NYC premieres, including: YOVO (NYC/Poland/Cuba), Death of the Liberal Class (“Essential theatre for the next generation”–HuffPost), Red-Haired Thomas (“a sweetly fractured fairy tale”–NY Times), PR Man (featured in American Theatre), and No Meat No Irony. (“Ralph Nader channeling Preston Sturges”–TimeOut NY). He has collaborated with Kristin Marting on multiple projects, including Idiot, Possessed, & The Fever (all from Dostoevsky), plus two original works: Lush Valley & Trade Practices. Robert’s work has been developed in residencies at Space at Ryder Farm, NACL, HERE Artist Residency Program, the Orchard Project, The Playwright’s Center of Minneapolis, MASS MoCA, the Bogliasco Foundation, and MacDowell Colony. Robert is also the founding Artistic Director of the New Ohio.
KODI LYNN MILBURN (Sound Design) (She/Her) is a mixed-indigenous theatre artist from Pine Ridge Reservation. Sylvia Milo’s The Other Mozart (Hong Kong, Players Theatre), Jody Christopherson’s AMP (HERE), Chess (American Theater for Actors), Uta Hagen Centennial Salon (Lincoln Center Library), I am the utterance of my name (Baryshnikov Arts Center), Sparkle Spa (Jill Santopolo, BMI World Trade Center), Obsessions (Brooklyn Arts Exchange), Ewalt & Walker (54 Below), Mary & Max, Jean Brassard’s Voyage en Chanson (National Sawdust), Till Soon, Anne, Of Trains and Heroes (NYU Casa Italiano), L’autre Mozart (Halifax Fringe), Joni, Je L’aime a Mourir, The Resurrection of (Plains Theater), The Making of Madeline Moore, Anne of Green Gables, Urinetown (under D.W. Costumes), Seeking Alice (Best musical NOVA film fest ’17), Chrysalis (original piece, 100 Bogart st.), Could you dance in my shoes? (Dir. Deidre Goodwin), Requiem for a Butterfly (The Delancey, Bar Nine), 3 albums on Spotify and iTunes. kodilynnmilburn.com
KAMALA SANKARAM (Composer / Master of Ceremonies) - NEW YORK: PROTOTYPE Festival: Magdalene, Bombay Rickey Meets the Psychology of Desire, Thumbprint; HERE Arts Center: Only You Will Recognize the Signal, all decisions will be made by consensus, Looking at You, Soundstage, Miranda, Sounding; Opera on Tap: The Parksville Murders; American Lyric Theatre: Enchantress. SELECT REGIONAL: Minnesota Opera: Interstate, The Glimmerglass Festival: The Jungle Book; Washington National Opera: Taking Up Serpents; Houston Grand Opera: A Rose, Monkey and Francine in the City of Tigers; Chicago Opera Theater: Taking Up Serpents; Shakespeare Theatre Company: The Oresteia; LA Opera:Thumbprint. INTERNATIONAL: Tête-à-Tête Opera (London, England): Bombay Rickey Meets the Psychology of Desire. FILM: Dentist, Five Infomercials for Dentists. AWARDS: Jonathan Larson Award; Innovative Theatre Award: Best Production of a Musical (Miranda). TEACHING: SUNY Purchase: Adjunct Professor of Composition. TRAINING: New School for Social Research: PhD. www.kamalasankaram.com
HANNAH STOFFER (Stage Manage) (She, Her, Hers) has been working with Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin for two years on Psychic Self Defense and Madame Lynch (Drunkard's Wife). She was a stage management fellow at American Conservatory Theater where she worked on Top Girls, Toni Stone, and middle and high school cabarets in 2019/20. During the pandemic, she decided to go back to school to study Entertainment Technology at City Tech in Brooklyn. She is also stage managing Love Parade at the Hudson Guild Theater as part of the 2021 New York Theater Festival.
CHISTINA TANG (Lighting Designer) (she/her) is a lighting designer and digital art amateur based in New York City. She is a frequent collaborator on new works for theater and dance. Recent credits include The Madman and the Nun (One-Eighth), CIRCLE (PSNY), Untitled: The Black Act (PSNY), and Madame Lynch (The Drunkard’s Wife). She is a 2021 winner of Opera America's Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Prize. Christinaftang.com
JAMES TERRELL (Costume Designer) is thrilled to be designing costumes for the world premiere of My Onliness. Select design credits include Busu, James & The Giant Peach, Pinkalicious, and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. When he is not designing, he can often be found listening to Korean pop music or daydreaming of owning a pet raccoon. He would like to thank this remarkable team of creatives for consistently inspiring him to be a better artist.
RHYS TIVEY (The Writer) - After receiving his bachelors in jazz performance at NYU, Rhys began his acting journey by performing in Phoebe Legere’s Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Reality Show at Theater for the New City in 2013, and later acted in a bizarre anarchistic underground theater in Berlin in 2019. As a vocalist, trumpeter, songwriter, and producer, he has released and performed three albums of original music. He also teaches voice as a mentee of Kristen Ruiz, taking additional influence from studies in yoga, meditation, improvisational movement, Qi Gong, and training under Betty Buckley. Visit rhystivey.com for updates on his journey as a performer, music creator, and teacher.
ALEXANDRIA WAILES (Director of American Sign Language) received a 2020 Obie Citation for Sustained Excellence as an Artist and Advocate and a Lortel nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play For Colored Girls.. at The Public. Broadway: Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, Big River (Tony Honoree for Ensemble). Off Broadway: Playwright Horizon’s I Was Most Alive with You, A Kind Of Alaska. Film: ‘The Hyperglot’; TV: ‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent’, ‘High Maintenance’, ‘Little America’, ‘Nurse Jackie’. As Director of Artistic Sign Language: the revival of Broadway’s Children Of A Lesser God and King Lear; TV/Film: This Close S. 1 & 2; Quantico S.3; CODA; A Quiet Place 1 & 2; Wonderstruck. Ms. Wailes advised ASL interpreted teams for Hands On and TDF on numerous Broadway shows. Currently a company member of Forest of Arden. She is also a co-founder of BHo5.org Proud member of AEA, SAG-AFTRA and SDC.
PRODUCING COMPANIES
One-Eighth Theater has been creating new, bold, international theater since 2008. One-Eighth is inspired by Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory--the alluring idea that some things are better left unexplained or open to interpretation. 'The tip of an iceberg is only one-eighth of what’s there, so much more lies beneath the surface'. Founded by theatre artists Daniel Irizarry and Laura Butler Rivera, One-Eighth has been both a New York Times and Time Out New York critics pick, developed work as a part of the New Ohio Theater and IRT’s Archive Residency, a four-year Residency at INTAR Theatre, and two residencies with Mabou Mines. Artistic director Daniel Irizarry has directed The Inspector General at NCPA in Mumbai, India, staged the world premiere of Witkacy's The Madman and The Nun with Turkish actors in Ankara, Turkey and the World premiere of Mishima's Busu at the Tennessee Williams festival in Provincetown, USA. Traveling and connecting is the key to our company and we have proudly shared sweat and art in Japan, United Kingdom, Lithuania, Germany, Turkey, Romania, UK, Poland, South Korea, Cuba, Puerto Rico, New York City—offering acting Labs and kicking ass sharing theatrical pieces along the way!
IRT Theater is a grassroots laboratory for independent theater and performance in New York City, providing space and support to a new generation of artists. Tucked away in the old Archive Building in Greenwich Village, IRT’s mission is to build a community of emerging and established artists by creating a home for the development and presentation of new work.
SPECIAL THANKS
Le Du Wines, HERE Arts Center, Monique Holt, Lenora Champagne, Amelie Lyons, Beth Prevor. Justine Rivera, Christopher Matthews, Carllee James, Miriam Rochford, Emily Hart, Alisa Besher.
My Onliness is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Source: NEW OHIO THEATRE - ICE FACTORY 2021 Source: NEW OHIO THEATRE
THE NEW YORKER REVIEW Everything Avant-Garde Is Old Again Mad kings and shadow puppets feature in the experimental-theatre pieces “My Onliness” and “This and That.”
If you ask experimental theatre about its intentions, you’ll usually hear about either revolution or radicality—something explosive. Even the term “avant-garde” is salvaged from the battlefield: when you’re struggling against realism, pieces are supposed to resist or defy or transgress. But look. Everybody’s tired. Anything, including revolution, can be repurposed as comfort right now. Nostalgia isn’t just for conservatives—we are in the time of the derriere-garde, experimental hygge, the avant-cozy...
Read full review here: THE NEW YORKER
THEATER MANIA REVIEW My Onliness is the Most Singularly Insane Show in New York Right Now
A Polish playwright, a mad king, and American Sign Language walk into an off-off-Broadway theater.
A man wearing a tinfoil papal tiara (and very little else) showers in a metal wash basin. Another man strums an electric guitar as handsome corseted gentlemen frolic with a rainbow unicorn. These are just the preshow diversions to Robert Lyons's My Onliness — a play that only gets stranger from there...
Read full review here: THEATER MANIA
NEW YORK THEATER REVIEW My Onliness Review: A Mad King, ASL, and Sensory Assault
“My Onliness” is billed as “a fable/cabaret/circus entertainment about a mad king’s desperate attempt to impress a mysterious petitioner” – a description that doesn’t completely capture the sensory assault and somersaults by the ceaselessly energetic cast, or the aggressive (albeit voluntary) audience participation, or the sheer busy-ness of this boisterous anarchic diversion. If (to put it constructively) you need to be in the right mood to find the fun in all of the show’s loud, chaotic 80 minutes, “My Onliness” does display some real inventiveness, and even hints at a seriousness of purpose...
Read full review here: NEW YORK THEATER
OFF OFF ONLINE REVIEW My Onliness
Echoing through the halls and into the New Ohio Theatre’s performance space is My Onliness, a daring new experimental work co-produced by the New Ohio, the collective One-Eighth Theater, and IRT Theater. Written by Robert Lyons, the artistic director of the New Ohio, My Onliness takes elements inspired by Polish dramatist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and transforms them into what One-Eighth declares is the New Absurd. And wonderfully absurd it is...
Read full review here: OFF OFF ONLINE
THEATER SCENE REVIEW My Onliness
My Onliness, Robert Lyons’ latest stage work, is a musical homage to Polish avant-garde playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (active 1918-1934) but who resurfaced during the 1960’s when his works began to be published and translated. Directed by Daniel Irizarry who also plays the leading role as the Mad King, My Onliness with lyrics by Lyons and original music by Kamala Sankaram, resembles the anarchic East Village plays and happenings of the 1960’s. It is part of a through line from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) to Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King (1962). A political fable for adults, My Onliness is performed as a cabaret and circus entertainment with exaggerated costumes, outrageous stage business, and audience participation. While the often obscure text is for the adventurous, it does touch on many hot current issues...
Read full review here: THEATER SCENE
STAGE BUDDY REVIEW Absurd dystopian fable 'My Onliness' is wacky, unhinged, and stupendous
Gertrude Stein once said of her own writing: "if you enjoy it, you understand it." If that's true, then I suppose I understood My Onliness: a world premiere musical about a mad king and his rebellious subjects. While I'm still parsing its intended meaning (if any), all I know for certain about this thoroughly absurd show is that I thoroughly enjoyed it. Presented by One-Eighth Theater, New Ohio Theatre, and IRT Theater, My Onliness is raw, unhinged, and stupendous...
Read full review here: STAGE BUDDY
THINKING THEATER NYC REVIEW The Crowning Absurdity of "My Onliness"
Late in My Onliness, a character known only as the Writer (Rhys Tivey) asserts, "The absurdity of life in-and-of-itself" is "something you won't see / on the stage of any theater." What we have seen to that point doesn't much support that claim, but then, the Writer himself observes that people require that their truths be wrapped in fiction or ceremony. The Writer is no favorite of the king (Daniel Irizarry)–the royal Onliness of the play's title–but artists and intellectuals are seldom beloved of authoritarians, and the king claims to both rule over and suffer for his subjects entirely on his own. If the Writer comes into conflict with the king merely by virtue of being "literary," Morbidita (Cynthia LaCruz), who delivers a (rather lengthy) petition to My Onliness early on, represents a more purposeful opposition. Playwright Robert Lyons identifies My Onliness, available in a new collection of Lyons's plays from Mercer Street Books, as an "homage" to Polish artist and writer Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), who adopted the name Witkacy. Witkacy often used absurdism in his work, and he also wrote on the theory of "pure form" in the theater: he believed that "the metaphysical disquietude" produced by questions about existence "was essential to enable the creative process to produce a unity of pure form" that would cause audiences to "perceive the artist’s 'heightened metaphysical feeling' in a sense related to their own individual condition. They participate in this unity and become part of it, identifying with the form" (Barlow 110).* The irresistibly energetic and immersively inventive My Onliness offers no shortage of absurdism (you might find the need to use a phrase like "graceful lobster" in discussing the production) or metaphysical disquietude (Morbidita, for instance, sings of the hideousness of the "very fact of existence" and the tiresomeness of awareness), and the spectator's participation is not only merely a matter of identification but is often made literal...
Read full review here: THINKING THEATER NYC
