So many friends have shows!2/1/2025 Dear friends, We hope your 2025 is going as well as it can so far, and that you're hopeful for the work ahead. TIA has a Cold Reading of Gertrude Stein shorts coming up on February 19 (details and RSVP here). But February brings lots of other exciting work as well. Check out some of what our friends are up to! Cheers, Theater in Asylum Our friend Ian has a show at the Starr! SLAMDANCE GARAGE FEBRUARY 5 - 22, 2025 At The Bushwick Starr: 419 Eldert Street, Brooklyn Wednesdays - Saturdays at 7:30pmCreated and performed by Ian Andrew Askew Produced in association with ¡Oye! Group SLAMDANCE garage is a solo performance on punk and blackness. Nestled somewhere between performance art, a rock show, and an one-act opera, Ian Andrew Askew hurdles through an hour of music, movement, and text celebrating the absurdity of explaining Black people’s participation in their own culture. SLAMDANCE garage borrows text from Nina Simone, Audre Lorde, Drexciya, and other luminaries, reharmonizing their words to the sounds of drums, distorted vocals, and the blaring resonance of a custom-one string bass. Inspired by the Malawian babatoni, Mississippi diddley-bow, and the Afro-Brazilian berimbau, the handmade instrument (nearly the same length as its player) is an homage to throughlines of musical technology that weave through the African diaspora. The Brick presents The Van Gogh Shogh Written and performed by Donna Oblongata Directed by Francesca Montanile-Lyons at The Brick Theater — 579 Metropolitan Ave February 6-9, 2025 at 8PM Running Time: 75 minutes Free show! Bring cash! One part deranged “Sip ‘n Paint”, one part karaoke night and one part Sotheby’s. In The Van Gogh Shogh, solo performer and clown Donna Oblongata uses the lens of Vincent Van Gogh’s life and legacy to ask urgent questions about the nature of art, success, reproduction, and the potential meaning(lessness) of a creative life. Find them: @donnaoblongata Content warnings: mentions of suicide, alcohol Photo credit: Josh Yoder NO RESERVATION conceived, written, & directed by Paul and Katie's beloved acting teacher Elizabeth Hess February 6-23 at La MaMa Diverse global goddesses crash a dinner party celebrating false gods. The goddesses have been underground for centuries but now rise up, sensing the urgency of their presence ‘at the table.’ This multidisciplinary performance piece moves forward from second wave feminist artists who took on the patriarchy through works like The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper by Mary Beth Edelson and the dinner scene in Top Girls by Caryl Churchill. The Loneliness of Either, Or; A Requiem for Joan of Arc by Ali Dineen and Boxcutter Collective Thursday, February 13th at 7 PM Ars Nova 511 W. 54th Street, New York, NY Friends of TIA Ali Dineen and Boxcutter Collective take the Ars Nova stage this February with a gorgeous new work that delves into the multi-faceted story of Joan of Arc as well as the composer’s own life. Where should we turn when our heroes and gods betray us? Blending gender, prophecy, and faith, The Loneliness of Either, Or: A Requiem for Joan of Arc is a musical meditation with original folk music for piano and chamber choir performed alongside an object theater puppet show that weaves history, politics, and personal experience. The Boxcutters are putting on a puppet slam! On Saturday February 22nd at The Fabulous Jalopy Theater and School of Music (315 Columbia Street Brooklyn) Boxcutter Collective will present a Puppet Cabaret! Doors at 7:30 SHOW at 8pm. We think you won’t want to miss this breathtaking line-up including: Ray The Bimbo Clown, Marlee Miller, Emmanuel Elpenord, Great Small Works and Boxcutter Collective! The Skeleton Rep(resents) Georgia and the Butch Adapted from Maria Chabot - Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941-1949 Adaptation by Carolyn Gage Directed by Andrew Coopman February 25th - March 12th The Tank 312 West 36th Street, New York, NY Friend of TIA Robert Gonyo sound designs a new play adapted from the letters between famous artist Georgia O’Keeffe and advocate for Native American arts and rancher Maria Chabot during their nine-year intimate relationship, from 1941 to 1949. This production is intended to highlight an intense and controversial intimacy that has been minimized, mischaracterized, or written out of Georgia’s history. It is a relationship between an older, gender-non-conforming, fiercely independent artist and a young lesbian butch who was experiencing profound confusion about her identity and about her place in the world. Whatever imbalances and dysfunction there may have been between these incredibly strong-willed and visionary women, one cannot dispute that the camping trips with Maria resulted in some of Georgia’s most iconic landscapes, and that the house and garden at Abiquiu, designed and built by Maria, stand as a stunning testament to a young lesbian’s all-consuming devotion to her muse. CRANKIES TAKE NEW YORK!
Feb 28th and March 1st at Flushing Town Hall Theater: 137-35 Northern Blvd, Flushing, NY 11354 General Admission: $20 Adults / $15 Members, Seniors, & Students w/ID Children are welcome and this performance is geared towards adults. Boxcutter Collective will perform 2 brand new crankie shows!! “Witches, Women and Witchcraft: The (Mostly) True Cranky of a Cranky Old Hag.” A brief history of the medieval witch hunts, as told by…witches! With their reproductive healthcare skills, and a team of singing bullfrogs, is it possible that witches are just what we need to defeat the imperialist capitalist patriarchy? AND “Haunted Lighthouse” A collaboration with Charming Disaster – a goth-folk musical duo based in Brooklyn, formed in 2012 by Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris. Inspired by the macabre humor of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, the murder ballads of the Americana tradition, and the dramatic flair of the cabaret, they write songs that tell stories about death, crime, myth, magic, folklore, science, and the occult. Boxcutter Collective is very excited to collaborate with these weirdos! Get Your Tickets for the 2/28 Show Here Get Your Tickets for the 3/1 Workshop/Performance Here
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2024 Transparency Report1/27/2025 Purpose Theater in Asylum believes transparency enables the sharing of power and responsibility. We commit to being open with how company decisions are made and money is spent. Below please find an overview of our finances in 2024. This is also on our website’s transparency page, a page we launched in 2021 as a way to showcase our finances and decision-making. Note: This is a financial summary of our work in 2024. For a non-financial review, please see our 2024 Year in Review. Big Picture Takeaways of Theater in Asylum’s 2024 Finances
2024 Major Projects & Expenses
*Theater in Asylum’s annual staff do not receive per-project stipends How We Paid People in 2024 Annual Staff The annually contracted staff listed below each received $100/month and did not receive project stipends.
**Because of Theater in Asylum’s current legal framework, payment to Paul, Katie, and Kathryn (the three partners of the LLC) are paid the company’s “profit.” Their pay, legally, is designated as “profit disbursement.” Although not legally required, all profits beyond the $100/month ($1,200 total each) administrative stipend amount were re-invested into the company. The How to Survive the End of the World Cabaret
Cold Readings
The FAUST/HOPE August Workshop
Grants We had a good year with grants! This past year we applied to:
Learnings and observations for future grant applications:
Fundraising Fundraising takes a lot of time, but we are lucky to have an incredible group of donors who continue to support our journey!
While we normally launch a fundraiser December-January in anticipation of each new year, we did not hold a December 2024-January 2025 fundraiser. We had hoped that our 501(c)3 transformation would be complete by now and that the fundraiser could have celebrated this milestone. We believe some folks who normally donate to that fundraiser donated to our general support fund instead. This may lower the amount we can raise in 2025 if we launch a mid-year fundraising campaign, because many of our donors appear to be on an end-of-year donation cycle. Ticketing 116 attended The How to Survive the End of the World Cabaret in person, with tickets on a sliding scale $0-$35.
*Keeping a free ticket option available at every event is a priority for us. We do not want cost to be a barrier to seeing our work. Free tickets are obtainable to anyone who needs one, no questions asked. Revenue Take-Away: Individual Donors Continue to be Critical to our Work Individual donations are by far our biggest income-source (70.6%). We are incredibly lucky that this is even possible, as we have a community that is both generous and able to donate a combined $15,944. Ticketing accounted for 3.9% of our income and grants accounted for 25.5% of our income this year. We are deeply grateful for all these avenues of financial support, and we acknowledge and want to praise two incredible institutions without whom we would not be able to make our work. The Episcopal Actors' Guild (EAG), where Paul works, allows us free use of their space as a perk of Paul’s employment. This saved us rehearsal costs for both the August FAUST/HOPE Workshop and the Cabaret. We also frequently host our Cold Readings at EAG, another huge saving for us. The Jalopy Theatre is another tremendous supporter, working with us to provide space that is within our budget. The amount we pay them in rental fees is, shall we say, below market. This is a true feat of generosity. Jalopy also lends us incredible trust with their lighting system, auxiliary spaces, and ticketing. EAG and Jalopy are those rare spaces in New York City where weird stuff is still happening because artists can actually afford to get in the door and make work. Read any arts publication these days, and you’ll see that the arts venue landscape is grim. Despite this, there are still true heroes tucked away in Red Hook and above a little Midtown church finding ways to truly support artists, and generously house groups like Theater in Asylum. Detailed Numbers Looking to 2025
Major Projects
Grants for FY2025 that we have applied for so far:
Ticketing
2025 Payment Structure
Thank you We are so grateful to this incredible community that continues to make so much possible. Thank you for holding us accountable and always asking us to be better. More of our transparency commitments, as well as previous years’ reports, may be found on our Transparency page. We also always invite feedback and contact info may be found on our Community page. Thank you all for making Theater in Asylum a vibrant community and fruitful for all involved. With gratitude, Paul, Katie, and Kathryn Theater in Asylum Ps. Please consider donating to Theater in Asylum! Hope Lives in Uncertainty1/20/2025 Dear Friends,
Today is a day that will be filled with complicated emotions. Some of us will be compulsively tuned in to the news, while others will be studiously avoiding it. Whatever your tactic is, we hope you’ll keep your chin up and your heart open. Today will surely influence the future, but it will not be the future’s sole determinant. We, too, have the potential to influence the future. From our Faust research, a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When we recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can known beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.” Stay strong. Say no to Mephistopheles and yes to your neighbors. We’ve got work to do. — Theater in Asylum Ps. Huge thanks to everyone who came out to our holiday party earlier this month (yes, in January)! We had a great time catching up with our friends in the TIA community, chatting about life updates and upcoming projects, and looking ahead to the new year. Theater in Asylum presents a Cold Reading of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus aka DOCTOR FAUSTUS Wednesday, January 22, 2025 7-10 PM ET Hybrid! In person in Manhattan and on Zoom Join us on January 22nd to read one of history’s greatest tales of ambition and demonology. Meet the scholar Faustus who conjures and subsequently enters into contract with the devil Mephistopheles. Journeys and cruelties ensue with the likes of Helen of Troy, the Pope, and – of course – Lucifer himself. It’s 2025 in America. What better time to question: “Is not all power on earth bestowed on us?” RSVP for more details!
What is a Cold Reading? For 10 years, Theater in Asylum has been gathering actors and non-actors to read (cold and without rehearsal) great plays. Following each reading, we discuss it, asking questions like, “What stood out?” “What is the play asking us?" and “How would you direct it here and now?” It’s something of a book club, but we read the entire book together on the spot. No expertise or great acting is needed. The stakes are low (there’s no possibility of extension) and high (this is opening and closing night!). The aim is to enjoy reading and discussing theater, and to build confidence in it. How does it work? Each Cold Reading begins with introductions so we know who’s in the room. We always read Theater in Asylum’s Community Agreements. Then a facilitator (the only one who needs to know the play beforehand) gives us a brief introduction to the play including who wrote it, when, where, and if there is any critical context we should have before diving in. Some plays have an intermission. Finally, we discuss it. Here’s the rough schedule of a Cold Reading:
Can I read? Yes! We try to shuffle roles around, prioritizing new folks. Do I have to read? No! You’re welcome to just listen. Do I need to be an actor? No! Do I need to read/know the play beforehand? No! Everyone is reading it “cold.” Are there rehearsals? No! Does it cost money? Is this a paid gig? No and no! Do I have to buy the script? No! We’ll give you one. If you’re able, we encourage everyone to bring a device (phone, tablet, laptop, etc.) to read the script. Categories
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Theater in Asylum (TIA) is a New York-based theater company founded in 2010 to challenge and empower our community. TIA joyfully pursues a rigorous research and an ensemble-driven approach to theater-making. We create performances to investigate our past, interpret our present, and imagine our future. We prize space to process, space to question—asylum—for ourselves and our community.
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