Thinking Theater NYC

Café Utopia featuring Julia Atwood, Al Piper, and Louis Reyes McWilliams Photo credit: John Keon Notch Theatre Company , which creates community-responsive cultural work to drive change around the pressing issues of our time, will host a series of community engagement and talkback events as part of their World Premiere of Café Utopia by Gwen Kingston ( New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and Oprah Daily ’s 'Most Anticipated Books of 2024' for Did I Ever Tell You?: A Memoir ), directed by Ashley Olive Teague (Founder and Artistic Director of Notch Theatre Company), November 2-23 at the Hudson Guild Theatre (441 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001).  What is  Café Utopia all   about?  Café Utopia seems like the perfect place to work: flexible hours, great benefits, free juice! But when mysterious pamphlets begin to appear, and key equipment breaks down, the staff start to question whether the renowned health food chain is truly all it seems. Preparing for a visit fr...

Café Utopia Written by Gwen Kingston Directed by Ashley Olive Teague Presented by Notch Theatre Company at Hudson Guild Theatre 441 W 26th St, Manhattan, NYC November 2-23, 2024 Café Utopia featuring Julia Atwood, Al Piper, and Louis Reyes McWilliams. Photo by John Keon. Recently, there have been some high-profile strike actions by unions in the United States, from the Writers Guild of America and Boeing to, currently, tech workers at The New York Times . Nevertheless, union membership has been greatly diminished in this nation since its peak in the 1950s, and unions and the labor movement will undoubtedly face increasing assaults under the incoming administration. Café Utopia , from playwright Gwen Kingston, approaches union organizing in our contemporary climate of stark inequality and neoliberal exploitation by spending time with the staff of one NYC location of a chain of stores selling juice and snacks with sides of self-improvement and self-affirmation. Interspersing voices fro...

gerstl took the easy way out Written by Lydia Blaisdell Directed by Ashley Olive Teague Developed and produced with Notch Theatre Company Presented at New Ohio Theatre 154 Christopher Street, Manhattan, NYC July 26-29, 2023; and on demand through August 12, 2023 Nikomeh Anderson, Amy Staats, and Marcel A. Mascaro. Photo by Molly Hagan Late in Lydia Blaisdell's gerstl took the easy way out , Mathilde (Amy Staats) points out that historical narratives ignore the people, primarily women, who enable men to be so-called geniuses by, for example, washing their dirty, sweaty underwear–a devaluation of the labor of social reproduction that is integral to heteropatriarchal capitalism. The Austrian Mathilde, atypically, has two men of genius to deal with: she is married to and has children with composer Arnold Schönberg (Marcel A. Mascaro) and has a passionate affair with Expressionist painter Richard Gerstl (Nikomeh Anderson). gerstl took the easy way out constructs its funny, angry, non-l...