Greetings!
It’s been another difficult year, but also one we were able to fill with theater:
live, livestreamed, audio, and virtual. Despite Covid, despite the loss of our co-founder, my brother David, our work continues.
We produced two audio drama podcasts, The Resistible Rise of J. R. Brinkley and The Iron Heel. Brinkley even reached the top ten of the Apple Podcast chart in the category of Comic Fiction. We presented a number of online programs: the ongoing Performance for One, a Zoom-based theater simulation game called Poor Players, and a holiday storytelling program called How to Play Dreidel with Judah Maccabee.
In May, as in person theater began to resume, we had two outdoor performances of Cabaret in Captivity, songs and sketches from Terezin. In August, we returned to indoor production: Alma Baya, an original absurdist science fiction play, which was available in-person, livestreamed, and on demand. The New York Times called it “a bleak, humor-flecked tale” and Stage Buddy raved “Waiting for Godot meets The Twilight Zone in this masterpiece of absurdist theatre.”
It was an expensive year, and we ended it with a $12,000 deficit, relying on our accumulated reserve, as audiences for the live show were down and expenses high. However, we feel it was worth the effort to continue to employ artists and to find a way for theater to once again thrive.
For this year, we plan to continue our audio drama programming, and we have selected Iphigenia in Aulis and Václav Havel’s Vaněk plays as our shows to record. We will also be releasing some of the music from these audio dramas as their own separate recordings. And we plan to once again perform Cabaret in Captivity, this time livestreaming it as well.
We are also going to London at last, for the transfer of our show The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. It was scheduled to play May – June 2020 Off-West End at the Jermyn Street Theatre, in Piccadilly Circus. It will now play this March – April 2022.
Finally, we are establishing the David A. Einhorn Playwriting Award. For 27 years my brother and I worked together to make UTC61 possible. He passed away this July, during the time we were rehearsing Alma Baya. This award will be given to a playwright with a history of self-production, as a way to support someone the way David supported both myself and UTC61 for all those years. The award will be for a new work in the tradition of classic absurdism, finding the comic in the tragic, and inspired by the topics that most excited him, from neuroscience to law to Jewish culture. The award will include both an immediate monetary prize and money for a future production. We will also present the winning play as a reading on what would have been my brother’s 61st birthday: December 11, 2022.
All of our contributors will be listed in our upcoming programs. Untitled Theater Company No. 61, Ltd. Is a 501c3 non-profit organization, so all donations are tax-deductible to the full extent permitted by law. To contribute, donate via our website or send a check (suggested amounts below) payable to: Untitled Theater Company No. 61, to 215 W. 95th Street, #11G, New York, NY 10025.
