THE CIVILIANS / 2015-16 Season
15 Years of Investigative Theater!
The Civilians 2015-16 Season marks our 15th year of creating innovative, investigative works of theater. This season we look forward to the world premieres of Another Word For Beauty by José Rivera at Goodman Theatre in Chicago and Rimbaud in New York written and directed by Steve Cosson at BAM.
Check out our Season Brochure HERE!
Written by José Rivera
Composed by Héctor Buitrago
Directed by Steve Cosson
The World Premiere of Another Word For Beauty will be produced by Chicago's Goodman Theatre.
January 16 - February 21, 2016
Each year the female inmates at a Bogotá, Colombia prison compete in a beauty pageant intended by their jailers to motivate and rehabilitate them. While the pageant's parade of glamorous gowns, exotic headdresses and rhythmic dances provide a distraction from daily suffering, its real impact on each woman is more than skin deep. Taking inspiration from interviews conducted with the contestants and other inmates, José Rivera's play is a haunting and soulful examination of women trapped within a prison's walls and the possibility of transcendence even in the most dire of circumstances.
To learn more about our investigation, click HERE.
To learn more about the Goodman's production, click HERE.
Written and Directed by Steve Cosson
Poems by Arthur Rimbaud translated by John Ashbery
Produced by BAM with major support from the Poetry Foundation
Songs by multiple composers*
March 1 - 6, 2016 at BAM
Boy genius, rebel, visionary, Rimbaud set off a bomb in the world of letters with the publication of Illuminations. 130 years later, this dazzling book of poems, written mostly in prose, continues to amaze . John Ashbery's recent highly-acclaimed translation offers us these poems through the wonderfully precise and always surprising language of one of America's greatest contemporary poets. For Rimbaud in New York, The Civilians create a wildly original, playful and enriching inquiry into the meaning and legacy of Illuminations, staging how these revolutionary poems continue to resonate in the American imagination, setting off explosions in the minds of new readers. The show finds Rimbaud in the 1950s of Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, in the downtown scene of the 1970s and in the many artists and musicians he's influenced -- Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, David Wojnarowicz and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name a few. But, most centrally the show focuses on the poems themselves, which The Civilians animate through performance, song and an eclectic theatricality that brings Rimbaud into the present, here and alive in New York City.
*Featuring songs by Adam Cochran, Michael Friedman, Rebecca Hart, Joseph Keckler, Grace McLean, David Cale and Matthew Dean Marsh.
To learn more about the BAM production, click HERE.
