Artist Talk: "LOVE"

ARTIST TALK: LOVE

thursday, march 9, 2023 at 6:00pm

featuring playwright and director Alexander Zeldin

in conversation with playwright and Armory Artist-in-Residence Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by the Charina Endowment Fund, the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, The Shubert Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, the Prospect Hill Foundation, the Reed Foundation, Wescustogo Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, GRoW @ Annenberg, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Richenthal Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council.

Cover image by Stephanie Berger Photography.

MEET THE PARTICIPANTS

ALEXANDER ZELDIN

Alexander Zeldin is a writer and director for theater and film. He made work in Russia, South Korea, the Middle East, and Italy before developing several of his own works at East 15 Acting School and working as Assistant Director to Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne. His critically acclaimed play, Beyond Caring, had its world premiere at the Yard Theatre in 2014 before transferring to the National Theatre in 2015. Beyond Caring toured the UK, and a new US production by Zeldin and Lookingglass Theater with Dark Harbour Stories opened in Chicago in April 2017. Zeldin’s play, LOVE, opened at the National Theatre in December 2016, before transferring to Birmingham Repertory Theatre, embarking on European tours in 2018, 2021, and 2022, and being made into a film by the BBC and Cuba Pictures. Faith, Hope and Charity—the third play in The Inequalities trilogy—opened to widespread acclaim at the National Theatre in 2019, where he is now an Associate Director, and his most recent play, Une mort dans la famille, opened at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris in 2022. The German version of Beyond Caring then opened at the Schaubühne in Berlin in April 2022. Zeldin is currently Associate Director at the National Theatre, Odéon-Théâtre, and Centre Dramatique National de Normandie-Rouen. Honors include the Quercus Trust Award (2015) and the Arts Foundation 25th Anniversary Fellowship for Literature (2018).

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a theater artist and writer. His work for the stage includes An Octoroon, Girls, Gloria, Appropriate, and Everybody. His new play The Comeuppance premieres this spring at the Signature Theatre where he is a Residency Five playwright. He serves on the boards of the Park Avenue Armory, Soho Rep, and the Dramatists Guild. In the fall of 2022, he joined the faculty at Yale University.

NEXT IN THE DRILL HALL

THE DOCTOR

June 3 – August 19

North American Premiere

After amazing Armory audiences with his adaptations of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (2022), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2022), and Ibsen’s Enemy of the People (2021), visionary director and playwright Robert Icke returns with the North American premiere of this gripping moral thriller following lauded runs at London’s Almeida Theatre and West End. This scorching examination of our age, a striking reimagining of the Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi, utilizes the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, identity, race, gender, privilege, and scientific rationality. Olivier Award winner Juliet Stevenson stars as the doctor at the center of the drama where nothing is quite what–or who–it seems. A galvanizing piece of theater, the production serves as a stark health warning for an increasingly divided nation, where clashing views about ourselves and our world only magnify the complexities of life.

DOPPELGANGER

September 22 – 28

World Premiere, A Park Avenue Armory Commission Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang (Swan Song) traverses a myriad of emotions, from despair and delusion to ecstasy and love, to form a series of masterful snapshots of all that life can offer. These emotive works are given a thrilling new life in the world premiere of a theatrical staging by one of opera’s most adventurous directors, Claus Guth. Performed by world-renowned tenor Jonas Kaufmann with his longtime collaborator pianist Helmut Deutsch, the heartmelting collection of songs is amplified by additional Schubert repertory, an evocative soundscape, and transformative light and video projections to create a production that is part performance and part installation art. Named for the last song “Der Doppelgänger,” in which a soldier comes to terms with death, this Armory commission explores the hunger for life and the idea that death is not a sudden moment but a last journey.