Theater is not really an American thing. It used to be. Actor-managers used to tour the country, playing big and small houses in cities and towns, entertaining both cultured urban aesthetes and entertainment-starved rural crowds. Over time, it morphed into vaudeville, the circus, burlesque. British music hall performers crossed the ocean to bring some of the old country's charms to the vast new nation. It's hard though -- this country was even bigger then in many ways, and travelling the miles between towns could wear out the hardiest of showbiz gypsies. Finding places that had any kind of performance hall to begin with could get tougher and tougher the further one travelled into the new territories and rambling landscapes. When cinema came along, it was the final nail in the coffin -- why truck dozens of performers, managers, technicians across difficult terrain when you could just throw a few spools of celluloid into a can and mail it along to the far parts of the massive United States? Easy. And the crowds ate it up, able to see far off lands they'd only read about, to see performers they could never hope to see up close and in person in their tiny little burgs or mid-sized cities.
And so vaudeville faded into television, and burlesque coarsened into gogo clubs and strip bars. And theater became the province of posh urban intellectuals, perpetually angry politicos, grievance merchants, professional neurotics, and starving artists. Walled off and distant, a vague notion to most Americans, who dreaded the thought of being badgered into monkey suits by the missus and hauled off to a poorly ventilated, crumbling town hall to watch corseted matrons roll their r's and swoon over gangly mustachioed dandies.
Theater is an American thing. It's in the American character, or at least it used to be, to look at the impossible and say, that looks doable. To think up the most insane notion and then set about making it happen. Making something out of nothing. This is a nation founded on wild ideas, reckless dreams, tireless effort. Theater is very much American. Look at that uninhabitable desert. See that? We're putting a casino there, no, screw that, dozens of casinos, and they'll have fountains, and a whole city around it. One of those casinos will look like Paris, another like New York City. Don't tell me it can't be done, I'll do it just to prove you wrong, and you'll happily pay for the chance to visit. Oh, and in our cities we're going to build skyscrapers so tall that they vanish among the clouds. Three of them. Wait. Twelve. Okay, one in each city. Why? Because we can. Also, we're putting a man on the moon because shut up, that's why.
And you see that black room? We're putting lights in it. And chairs. It's a theater now. What's that? It's just a room? Oh no it's not. It's now a train leaving New York City for a small New England town. Now, it's an entire Western mining town circa 1870. Wait -- now it's the steps in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Why? Because we said so. We live in dreams. We make them, we eat them, we create dreams. Theater is an American thing.
Anyone can do this. There are some school kids rehearsing their production of the Wiz right now, and they'll perform it under clamped work lights in the school cafeteria for twenty people on a Wednesday night. And it is just as legitimate and viable as whatever jukebox musical opened on Broadway last week. It's all theater. It's all good. It's all dreams.
Most playwrights and artists don't like America, not really. You're rolling your eyes right now, but you know it's true. America is sloppy, stubborn, America is vile and glorious in equal measures. Everyone has the chance to be amazing and everyone has the right to be a moron. This is good. This is art. This is how people should be. We're losing this. We're losing it in an acid rush of adolescent rage, a broken, selfish binary struggle that demands that anyone who disagrees with you on any topic up to and including lunch orders can't just be of a different mindset, they must be evil incarnate, their ideas must be snuffed, smothered, shouted down. A cacophony of emptiness, barely-informed people shrieking like chimps to drown out the slightest dissent. "I'm offended." So what? This is the death of art. That's not very American.
We've done quite a few shows about America, and Americans, and what being American might mean. Some have been funny, some angry, some sad, some hopeful. Sometimes, I fear they're all time pieces now, antiques.
When I started DMT two decades ago, a few spaces I applied to asked me for a manifesto, which I hated the idea of since I was trying to mount plays, not dictate terms during an international diplomatic crisis. Manifesto? Seriously? Well, I guess this is my manifesto.
Now get off my lawn.
-- Frank Cwiklik, NYC 2015
REPERTORY
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Nevada Territory (2004)
The Red Room, November/December 2001
ABOUT
"Cwiklik composes moment after moment of real beauty... a precise and calculated sense of menace... A MOVING AND UNIQUE PIECE OF THEATER." -- Frank Episale, OOBR.COM
WINNER 2002 OOBR AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION
Pure evil hides itself in a small American town when an escaped Nazi official adopts a new identity and marries into one of America's most prominent families... until an obsessed stranger arrives to flush out his true identity. The only one who can help him -- and one of the only people to know his horrifying secret -- is the woman who loves him. And even she can't help him anymore...
Gripping and unrelenting, Orson Welles' emotionally charged World War II spy classic was presented in a form closer to that which Welles originally intended, including restored scenes and original casting conceits. DMT mainstay Peter B. Brown, who appeared in the acclaimed Fringe 2001 production of Daniel Kleinfeld's A Little Piece of the Sun, stars as the hunted, desperate Franz Kindler, who, having assumed the guise of New England schoolmaster Charles Rankin, has managed to infiltrate his way not only into an average American town, but into one of America's most important political families. Sarah Jane Bunker, who appeared in Quicksand and Bitch Macbeth, plays the tormented Mary Longstreet, who falls in love with Charles -- only to find herself having to protect Kindler. And Michele Schlossberg brings the smoldering intensity that earned her a sizable fan following in The Fugitive Girls! to the role of Wilson, the determined, ruthless spy hunter who will stop at nothing -- not even the destruction of a New England community -- to catch this inhuman monster.
Noir in tone, fatalistic in nature, and full of rage and horror at the loss and waste of war, this entry is like the cry of a wounded beast. It is impossible to look away. The Stranger opened at the historic Red Room on December 6th, 2001, playing to enthusiastic audience response and rave reviews.
GALLERY
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PROMO
CREDITS
Adapted from the motion picture THE STRANGER, written by Anthony Veillor and John Huston, adapted by Orson Welles
Screen Story by Victor Trivas and Decla Dunning
Adapted for the stage and with additional material by Frank Cwiklik
Your cast of characters (in order of their appearance on our stage):
TOM REID as Meinikie
GERALD MARSINI as Farbright
IAN W. HILL as Faber
JOSH MERTZ as Guinaza
GERALD MARSINI as the Photographer
MICHELE SCHLOSSBERG as Wilson
JOSH MERTZ as Potter
SARAH JANE BUNKER as Mary
PETER B. BROWN as Rankin/Kindler
IAN W. HILL as Longstreet
DAN MACCARONE as Noah
GERALD MARSINI as Jeff
MOIRA STONE as Sarah
Set Construction/Technicals: Berit Johnson
Publicity: Scott Makin
Additional Voiceover and ADR: Carrie Johnson, Frank Cwiklik, Ian W. Hill, Moira Stone
Special thanks to Bob Laine, Trav S.D., and especially Sam Schneider
PRODUCED BY MICHELE SCHLOSSBERG AND FRANK CWIKLIK
ADAPTED, DESIGNED AND DIRECTED BY FRANK CWIKLIK
The Red Room, July/August 2002
ABOUT
MEET THE MAGGOTS.
Preacher Bob, garbageman by day, Baptist preacher by night, trying to reconcile the demands of God with the longings of the flesh. ... Toby, sixteen, bitter, confused, lost in a world that doesn't understand him and in love with a married woman at the end of her rope. ... Pubert, a glue sniffing malcontent who sleeps all day and ruts all night with Angel, the gothic psychotic alien abductee. ... Mama, TV junkie, food glutton, convinced that the world is full of ghosts and piss. ... Hayseed, goatlover, mental deficient, more concerned with his obsessions than his family. Stereotypes? Lowlifes? Lost? Insane?
The mutant love child of O Brother Where Art Thou and The Rocky Horror Show, House of Trash is new vaudeville legend and bestselling author Trav S.D.'s sinister, darkly comic cornpone musical extravaganza. Featuring original songs, vaudevillian lunacy, and the world's first truck driving gorilla companion, this show both explores and destroys every cliché you’ve ever heard about rural Americana – deftly satirizing and sympathetically humanizing the kind of people most New Yorkers would run screaming from. Thought provoking, hysterically funny, disturbing, infectious, alarming, moving, it’s not like anything you’ve seen before, and if you think you have, you haven’t seen it like this.
DIRECTORS' NOTES, 2010
I am a contrarian pain in the ass.
The first time I had the chance to hear the text of this show was at a reading at a legendary and long-time theater company who shall remain nameless because they are dead to me. Trav invited Michele and me to attend a reading of House of Trash that was being held as part of a festival of new works (even though the show had been produced several times at that point, which, there you go). I hadn't yet had the chance to read or see the show, as I am a hermit, so we went. It was one of the most infuriating experiences I've ever had in a theater.
The condescension these people showed to the material, and the snide glee they were taking in skewering its subject matter, which they didn't even attempt to understand, was galling. But what made it worse was the lack of respect for the playwright -- who was, after all, sitting right fucking there -- and for the audience.
See, it's tough for me to go to shows, and I can't read fiction at all. This is because my lizard pea brain won't stop working. Even if it's a good show, I can't stop trying to recast the actors in other roles, or think of how a moment in a show might help me crack a problem in one of my own. And if it's a bad show, forget it, I spend the entire time seething in agony, mentally unpacking and rebuilding the entire show and fixing it, wondering why these clowns can't figure out the problem with the show when legally brain damaged chimps like myself can see the solutions plain as day.
By intermission -- which was almost 90 minutes in, as these chucklefucks had all the comic timing of a sponge, delivering vaudevillian patter with funereal slowness -- I'd already cornered Trav and asked if we could do the show for our Summer slot at the Red Room, to which he foolishly said yes, the poor unsuspecting bastard. It then gave me great pleasure after the show during the Q&A when some shitclam in the cast snarked about how you couldn't really stage the play as written, at which point I spoke up and said that we were doing it, it would be opening in about four months, and we would do all the musical numbers these philistines wanted to cut. Then I peed on the stage. Well, no, I didn't, but that would have been badass. I did shut that guy up, though, and the response to my announcement was mute shock and embarrassment from these unimaginative little farts who were still staging a 30-year-old play (now 40) the same way week in and week out for the same sad Upper West Side harridans.
I AM AVAILABLE FOR CHILDREN'S PARTIES.
Long story short (that ship has sailed), the finished production was calculated to slowly draw in and then repulse the typical downtown NYC theater crowd who would come to mock the lowly white trash of the "flyover" region (and that phrase can die in a car fire, while we're at it -- hey where you going?). It was very meta, probably too meta in hindsight, but it did have moments that successfully lampooned my own style, the excesses of downtown art theater in general, and the wide-eyed infant terror with which New Yorkers view the world beyond the four boroughs. And, we had a guy in a gorilla suit, which owns. As I am no longer an angry young man, but rather a bitter and broken old man, I would be less confrontational in my staging were I to tackle it now. I'd still do the gorilla suit though, because it is in the script, and gorilla suits make any show a great show.
"fast-paced, swift, genuine... simply brilliant.”
-- Carlo Fiorletta, Stage Press Weekly
GALLERY
Meet the Maggots. L to R: Ma (Michele Schlossberg), Toby (Dan Maccarone), Preacher Bob (Josh Mertz)
Josh Mertz as Preacher Bob Maggot
Johnatha Bates as Angel, Adam Swiderski as Pubert
Dan Maccarone as Toby, Moira Stone as Babe
Roger Nasser as Hayseed
Dan Maccarone as Toby
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PROMO
postcard, front
CREDITS
DANSE MACABRE THEATRICS
in association with HORSE TRADE THEATER GROUP
presents A MUSICAL BY TRAV S.D.
HOUSE OF TRASH
Starring
JONATHA BATES * DAN MACCARONE * JOSH MERTZ * ROGER NASSER
JOE POPP * MICHELE SCHLOSSBERG * MOIRA STONE * ADAM SWIDERSKI
AND FEATURING THE MUSIC OF THE MAGGOT FAMILY RAMBLERS!Musical Direction ADAM SWIDERSKI
Publicity SCOTT MAKIN
Sound Design and Recording YOUTHQUAKE!
Produced by FRANK CWIKLIK and MICHELE SCHLOSSBERG
BOOK, MUSIC AND LYRICS BY TRAV S.D.
DESIGNED AND DIRECTED BY FRANK CWIKLIK
The Red Room, June/July 2003
ABOUT
... Being the adventures of Bailey Sugarman, 17 years old, in love with old pop culture, America, and the pursuit of, ahem, happiness, who runs away from home with her only true friend, Jesus, the gas station attendant who thinks he's Elvis...
War, unemployment, terrorism -- what's a simple country girl to do? Well, if you're Bailey Sugarman, 17 years old and cute as a button (her friends call her Sugarbaby), you run away from home, with the help of your best friend Jesus, the mechanic who thinks he's Elvis, to see America, before it's all sold off, co-opted, argued away, blown up, or just plain lost. And if you're Sheriff Rufus J. Miranda, you issue an Amber Alert, hunting this cornfed firecracker across this great land of ours, not letting anyone or anything get in your way. If you're Rod Butane, best-selling, top-rated conservative talk show host, you accuse Arab terrorists of kidnapping the girl, and use her mission as an excuse for ratings, notoreity, and your own agenda. And if you're political filmmaker Mitch Common, you know you've found your new documentary subject, your new counterculture icon, and a license to print money.
But if you're Sugarbaby, why, all you wanna do is see America -- open roads, crystal blue sky, drive-ins and casinos, the high and the low, and all the noise that everybody's making about you is just getting in the damn way... Time for drastic measures...
Writer/Director Frank Cwiklik's most-published and likely best-known original work, Sugarbaby! is a raucous, mischevious, sexy, nasty, noisy, no-holds-barred satire on American politics, mores, and hysteria, a cross-country chase that winds from backwoods America to sin city itself, Las Vegas; from the marshlands of Florida, to -- Heaven itself?? Ending in a stirring, riotous take-no-prisoners march on the Great Mall in Washington, DC, no one is safe and nothing is sacred in the least political political comedy ever to appear on the New York stage. Playing to packed houses and rave reviews, Sugarbaby! was published in the New York Theater Experience's Plays and Playwrights 2004, and has been used as course material for theater and playwriting classes on the high school and college level.
"Brilliant, spectacular, ... THEATRE JUST DOESN'T GET MORE VITAL, ENTERTAINING, OR EXUBERANTLY IN-YOUR-FACE”
-- Martin Denton, NYTheatre.com
GALLERY
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PROMO
20X40 lobby poster
CREDITS
produced in association with Horse Trade Theater Group
AMANDA ALLEN / ERIK BOWIE / BRANDON KALBAUGH / DAN MACCARONE / ANGELA MADALINE / JOSH MERTZ / KEVIN MYERS* / MICHELE SCHLOSSBERG / ALEX WARNER* / JONATHAN WISE
featuring ADAM SWIDERSKI as JESUS / and MARGUERITE FRENCH as SUGARBABY
PRODUCED BY Frank Cwiklik and Michele Schlossberg
WRITTEN, DESIGNED, AND DIRECTED BY Frank Cwiklik
^appears courtesy Actors' Equity Assn.
Todo Con NADA, September/October 2000
The Red Room, July/August 2004
ABOUT
A CENTURY OF ROMANCE
From ragtime to techno. From Lower East Side tenements to Fifth Avenue penthouses. From lust to love and back again. A sweeping romance both epic in scope and heartrendingly intimate, this sprawling record of our recent past melds pop culture, sex, and history in a whirlwind tour of the Twentieth Century’s highest and lowest moments.
Adapted freely from Arthur Schnitzler’s legendary “La Ronde”, Twenty traces the history of eleven men and women from various walks of life, as they fall in and out of love, bed, and time. Fact and fiction blend seamlessly in this steamy, intimate, emotionally charged piece as a ghostly parade of starcrossed romantics confess their desires, hopes, dreams, and fears to their lovers. Moving, funny, unnerving, unsparingly honest, each scene captures an instant in the life of the fastest, largest, most frightening, most intriguing hundred years in recorded times.
Originally staged as the swan song of the legendary Todo Con Nada in late 2000, Twenty was a startling and moving change of pace for DMTheatrics, and an impressive showcase for its tireless company of actors and artists. Both breathlessly romantic and wrenchingly honest, this melancholy, nostalgic look at the American Century neatly summarized DMTheatrics' reputation for engaging, immersive, human theater. Both a history of New York City's rise, fall, and rise again throughout the turbulent 1900's, and a sexy, bawdy glimpse into the lives of its citizens, Twenty enchanted, delighted, and moved its audiences again when it was staged in 2004 in the Red Room,.
GALLERY
2000 Todo Con NADA production. L to R: Tracey Paleo, Yuri Lowenthal.
Christiania Cobean, Yuri Lowenthal
Frank Cwiklik, Christiania Cobean
Yuri Lowenthal, Tracey Paleo
2004 Red Room production (all photos by Moira Stone): L to R, Bob Brader, Sarah Bloom, Lara Hughes, Tom Mazur, Lauren Seikaly
Tom Mazur, Lauren Seikaly
Bob Brader
L to R: Lauren Seikaly, Lara Hughes, Sarah Bloom, Moira Stone
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PROMO
L , 8x14 poster for 2000 production; R, postcard front for 2004 production
CREDITS
2000 TODO CON NADA PRODUCTION:
DANSE MACABRE THEATRICS PRESENTS
TWENTY.
1900'S : FRANCO Yuri Lowenthal, LEOCADIA Tracey Paleo
1910'S: FRANCO Yuri Lowenthal, MARIE Christiania Cobean
1920'S: ALFRED Frank Cwiklik, MARIE Christiania Cobean
1930's: ALFRED Frank Cwiklik, EMMA Christiaan Koop
1940's: CARL Douglas Scott Sorenson, EMMA Christiaan Koop
1950's: CARL Douglas Scott Sorenson, KITTY Tracey Paleo
1960's: ROBERT Yuri Lowenthal, KITTY Tracey Paleo
1970's: ROBERT Yuri Lowenthal, JESSICA Christiania Cobean
1980's: RON Frank Cwiklik, JESSICA Christiania Cobean
1990's: RON Frank Cwiklik, LEO Tracey Paleo, LOVERS Yuri Lowenthal & Christiaan Koop
Loosely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde
Produced by Frank Cwiklik and Michele Schlossberg
Written and Directed by Frank Cwiklik
2004 RED ROOM PRODUCTION:
DMTHEATRICS in association with HORSE TRADE THEATER GROUP present
TWENTY.
SARAH BLOOM * BOB BRADER * FRANK CWIKLIK * LARA HUGHES * TOM MAZUR
JOSH MERTZ * KEVIN MYERS * LAUREN SEIKALY * MOIRA STONE
Produced by FRANK CWIKLIK and MICHELE SCHLOSSBERG
Written, designed, and directed by FRANK CWIKLIK
Twenty. (2004)
