New York City Players

In 2022, we began to return to a more typical pre pandemic activity level, with a return to international touring with our Italian tour of Queens Row, NYC workshop productions and new play development, and a new and expanded Incoming Theater Division project. The start of the year was busy with Field of Mars (unfinished), a new play written and directed by Richard Maxwell that received work-in-progress showings February 3-5, 2022 at Los Kabayitos Theater at The Clemente Soto Vlez Cultural Center in Lower Manhattan. After a January 2022 stage premiere at NYUs Skirball Center was postponed to 2023, we decided to share the results of our residency at LMCC on Governors Island as a three night workshop run for audiences. The Kabayitos puppet theater at The Clemente proved to be an excellent, affordable rental theater for the play and allowed us to keep our audience in the loop on our development and also re-establish our relationship with The Clemente and a Lower East Side community. The three performances were sold out, reaching a total audience of 200. In March, after months of navigating through ever-changing layers of international Covid regulations, NYCP finally returned to presenting abroad with our show Queens Row, presented at Triennale Milano, Italy. NYCP was invigorated to regain contact with the audience in Milan, and despite all the logistical hoops, the show went off without a hitch and audiences seemed genuinely engaged by the performance. The income received for this engagement bolstered our financial position in 2022.The 2022 Incoming Theater Division project Graceland was a live, site-specific documentary work, conceived and directed by Katiana Rangel about the housing experiences of ITD ensemble members. Real stories were written and developed by ITD members into a theater work created collectively during two artistic residencies, in January and April, at LMCC studios on Governors Island. Performances were held May 16-17 at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island, in one of the Centers historic cottages that are available for emerging artists. During 12 hours of public work sessions over two days, held throughout the house and yard, we experimented with the sequence, space, and performance of the scenes. Audiences followed the performance through various rooms and spaces while collaborating artist Mihwa Lee filmed the sessions. The cottages empty, aging shell and its remote location resonated with the spoken stories that touch on questions of displacement, hardship, family, independence and security, as housing remains one of New York Citys most salient indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage.