THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE
Jeffrey Horowitz
FOUNDING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Dorothy Ryan MANAGING DIRECTOR
Robert E. Buckholz CHAIR
RATTLESTICK THEATER
Will Davis
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Maegan Morris MANAGING DIRECTOR &
Jeff Thamkittikasem CHAIR
Present
the World Premiere of
book and lyrics by ETHAN LIPTON
music composed and performed by EBEN LEVY, IAN RIGGS, VITO DIETERLE, AND ETHAN LIPTON directed by LEIGH SILVERMAN
On the Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage Featuring VITO DIETERLE, EBEN LEVY, ETHAN LIPTON, AND IAN RIGGS
Scenic Designer LEE JELLINEK
Costume Designer ALEJO VIETTI
Lighting Designer ADAM HONORÉ
Properties Supervisor JON KNUST
Sound Designer NEVIN STEINBERG
Production Stage Manager CAROLINE ENGLANDER
Press Representatives BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES and EVERYMAN AGENCY
First preview November 7, 2024
Opening night November 24, 2024
Open captioning is provided, in part, by a grant from NYSCA/TDF TAP Plus.
Projection Designer KATHERINE FREER
We Are Your Robots was originally commissioned by: Media Art Xploration, Inc. with support from the Ensemble Studio Theater / Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Project and produced by MAXlive in concert version in association with ArKtype.
We Are Your Robots was developed, in part, with assistance from the Orchard Project ( www.orchardproject.com ), Ari Edelson, Artistic Director.
Creative Capital Awardee 2023.
(in alphabetical order)
A Robot....................................................................................................................................................... VITO DIETERLE
A Robot............................................................................................................................................................... EBEN LEVY
A Robot....................................................................................................................................................... ETHAN LIPTON
A Robot................................................................................................................................................................ IAN RIGGS
Production Stage Manager...........................................................................................................
Assistant Stage Manager..........................................................................................................................
*Member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
WE ARE YOUR ROBOTS IS PRESENTED WITHOUT AN INTERMISSION.
Please be advised this performance uses haze effects and flashing lights.
This Theatre operates under an agreement between the League of Resident Theatres and Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
The stage managers employed in this production are members of Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States.
The scenic, costume, lighting sound and projection designers in LORT Theatres are represented by United Scenic Artists, Local USA-829 of the IATSE.
Principal support for Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs is provided by the Bay and Paul Foundations, the Marlène Brody Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund at the New York Community Trust, The Polonsky Foundation, The SHS Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and The Thompson Family Foundation.
Major season support is provided by The Arnow Family Fund, Sally Brody, Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine, Constance Christensen, The Hearst Corporation, The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, The Starry Night Fund, Stockel Family Foundation, Anne and William Tatlock, The Tow Foundation, Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein, and The White Cedar Fund.
Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs are also made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
GOVERNMENT SUPPORTERS: Rattlestick Theater is supported, in part, by public funds from the following New York City institutions:
INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORTERS: Rattlestick Theater extends our immense thanks to the following foundations for their generous support of our mission:
Actors' Equity Foundation, Axe-Houghton Foundation, The Ellen M. Violett and Mary P.R. Thomas Foundation, Ford Foundation, Frederic R. Coudert Foundation, Georganne Aldrich Heller Foundation, Greg and Mari Marchbanks Foundation: Horton Foote Prize, The Hyde and Watson Foundation, The John Golden Fund, The Lucille Lortel Foundation, MacArthur Family Charitable Foundation, Nancy Friday Foundation, New Tamarind Foundation, The NYU Community Fund, Select Equity Group Foundation, The SHS Foundation, Still Point Fund, Stolbun Family Foundation, The Terrence McNally Foundation, The Tow Foundation
7 "We Have to Be Collaborators in Our Own Evolution" Ethan Lipton and Leigh Silverman in conversation with Jeremy McCarter
16 Dialogues: Quantum Robots by David V. Forrest, MD
20 A Very Human Conversation with a Band of Robots Vito Dieterle, Eben Levy, Ethan Lipton, and Ian Riggs in conversation with Sammy Zeisel
25 Glossary: Terms (Without Conditions) For Your Robots
29 Bios: Cast and Creative Team
33 About Rattlestick Theater
35 About Theatre For a New Audience
Notes
Front Cover: Design by Kerri Gaudelli
This Viewfinder will be periodically updated with additional information. Last updated November 27, 2024.
Credits
We Are Your Robots 360° | Edited by Peter J. Cook
Resident Dramaturg: Jonathan Kalb | Council of Scholars Chair: Tanya Pollard | Designed by: Milton Glaser, Inc.
Publisher: Theatre for a New Audience, Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director
We Are Your Robots 360° Copyright 2024 by Theatre for a New Audience. All rights reserve d.
With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Viewfinder may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electr onic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials herein are written especially for our guide. Others are reprinted with permission of their authors or publishers.
Vito Dieterle, Ian Riggs, Ethan Lipton, and Eben Levy in We Are Your Robots . Photo by Hollis King.
“WE HAVE TO BE COLLABORATORS IN OUR OWN EVOLUTION”
On October 29, 2024, during a break from Robots rehearsal, Jeremy McCarter spoke with Ethan Lipton and Leigh Silverman about their creative partnership, their pre-show rituals, and why Ethan feels that, to play a robot, " I have to be more myself" This conversation, conducted via Zoom, has been condensed and edited.
JEREMY MCCARTER People are most likely reading this in the program right before the show. Which means, Ethan, you are someplace backstage, about to step out. What are you doing right now?
ETHAN LIPTON I am reminding myself of where I am and what I’m doing. And I am chatting with the band, and then walking off and chatting with myself.
JEREMY A pep talk?
ETHAN Yeah, and maybe just reviewing the data, reviewing some aspect of the show. But really, trying
to be present. The glory of playing with the guys is that they’re amazing to be present with. When I have a good show or a good concert with them, I kind of have no idea what happened, because we were just all in it together from start to finish.
JEREMY Leigh, what are the chances that you are also backstage right now?
LEIGH SILVERMAN Zero. I’m definitely in the back of the house, and even if I am not physically in the back of the house, my mind is in the back of the house, wherever I am. Also, I’m flying the plane with my mind, as I like to say. Which, as is the case with everybody who thinks they’re flying the plane when they’re flying, they’re not doing anything.
JEREMY If our friend who’s reading this program note right now were to turn around and wave to you, would you wave back?
“WE
LEIGH No. One of the experiences that is both joyful and painful about being a director is that no one actually knows who you are. So, if someone knows who I am, and they do wave to me, I might not do anything just because I’m so shocked.
JEREMY Now I want to be in the theater and watch you have that interaction and see what happens. So, this show poses a question about what humans want from their machines. Ethan, did you feel like you had an answer when you started working on it, or did answers emerge in the process?
ETHAN I had some assumptions, and I was wrong. Well, I can’t say that I was wrong, but my assumptions changed. I think I believed that tech was kind of inherently nefarious in some way, and that what humans are supposed to want is to get it under control. And what I ended up feeling after spending time with the material was that the real question is: what do humans want for themselves? Not that tech does not have many dangers to it—it does—but that really tech is a mirror for us. And that what it’s going to do is just give us more power to do the things we’re already doing to ourselves and to each other.
And I feel like we don’t talk a lot about evolution. There’s sort of this presumption that evolution’s maybe kind of stopped. And for me, working on the show made me feel like we really have to be collaborators in our own evolution. We have to use the parts of ourselves that don’t totally want to destroy ourselves, or other people. If that makes sense.
LEIGH Yeah.
JEREMY It does. You mentioned the material that you dipped into. How far afield did you go to find inspiration or data?
ETHAN I went pretty far, and I mostly went pretty shallow. [ Laughter ] But in some way, I was computing the whole time. I…
JEREMY That’s pretty Method, actually, considering you play a robot in the show.
ETHAN Yeah. You know, I’m not an expert in any of these fields, but I could engage with them in lots of
different ways. And I liked the shape of some of the conversations around artificial intelligence, around robotics, around neuroscience. I loved listening to and reading about how these inventors’ brains worked. Because it was like they were trying to get tech to do what they do. And so the way they told stories was so helpful to the shape that our story ended up taking. Then Leigh, when she came on board, kept reconnecting me to story through another vector, which was kind of the emotional vector. I never use the word vector, but somehow now that I’m talking about AI, I’m talking about vectors.
JEREMY You start playing a machine and it’s just in there now.
ETHAN Look at that: it’s in there, I can’t get it out.
JEREMY Leigh, when Ethan comes to you with this material and these ideas, what’s your first response?
“WE
LEIGH Unlike some of the other projects that Ethan and I have worked together on, I kept saying, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. I’m not totally sure.” And in a certain way, my love for Ethan, and Ethan’s writing and his voice, is so deep that I trusted that I would eventually get it. And I also trusted that he was onto storytelling in a new way, and that, as his collaborator, it was imperative that I understand. The way that he is making this show with his band is different than the other two shows we’ve done together with the band, No Place to Go and The Outer Space
ETHAN To elaborate there: I was consciously trying to do something that didn’t center my own experience, which has been the tradition of one-person shows for forever and a day, but also the tradition of the other shows we’ve created. I was like, “Can we create a show in this form that feels like it’s about the audience ?”
There isn’t an intuitive path through that, necessarily. We really had to find it and iterate. But I knew that it was a place I wanted to go, and was excited to go: “What can we do with this form?”
JEREMY There’s a kind of riddle in developing a show like this, one that involves so much direct interaction with the audience: before you put it in front of an audience you need to make sure it works, but to make sure it works you need to put it in front of an audience. Just in a very practical way, how do you prepare a show like this?
ETHAN Kind of like you do the other shows, in some way....
JEREMY But more so.
ETHAN Yeah.
LEIGH Yeah.
ETHAN You treat it as text, and you learn it. And the experience of it keeps unfolding in front of you. And we’ll have a totally different experience once we get in front of an audience.
LEIGH Also, this is the first of Ethan’s band shows that isn’t happening at Joe’s Pub. And it’s not happening
“WE
at just one theater, it’s happening at two , in a coproduction, with a full design team. I think the added support is something that also is new in terms of the experience of it, and the growth of the material, and how we all work together. That’s been really exciting to develop and uncover.
And part of what has been interesting to me in this journey has been that a show about machines is actually a show about humanity. We’re still the central problem and we’re still the central curiosity. It’s just that, instead of Ethan playing a character who is like us, he’s playing a character who is struggling and working to be like us, or to be trusted by us, in a certain way.
That creates this understanding between the audience. There are so many layers of subtle communication that are going on back and forth. Ironic communication, sly communication, curious communication—it’s all the subtext underneath Ethan’s really brilliant text. The thing we’re trying to cultivate in this rehearsal process is a sense of the audience being both into it, onto the joke of it, and simultaneously surprised.
ETHAN I’ll just add that something I did not expect was that, performatively, I feel like I have to be more myself in this show than I was in either of the other shows.
How so?
ETHAN I have to be more alive. We’re not acting like robots. Since the conceit of the show is that we are members of a band that look and sound like us, we really have to look and sound like us. There were moments early on when I was like, am I gonna put on an affect of some kind, or am I gonna dry this out? But it’s really my body up there doing it, my voice up there doing it. And the same is true for the guys. That has been a surprise, and I think that is part of how we imbue it with humanity.
LEIGH Yeah.
ETHAN And remind people that that’s what’s actually going on.
LEIGH Because, also, our phones don’t act like phones—they act like people. You pick it up and it says, “Oh, hello Leigh. How are you today?”
JEREMY Right.
LEIGH It doesn’t act like a cold, nefarious, blank, robotic thing. You can choose what kind of voice you want your phone to talk to you in. You know, there’re all these ways that you can make many of your machines do and behave exactly how you want, which is not less human, it’s more human.
And so, in the concept of this show, their humanity, as robots—
ETHAN Is what the audience…
LEIGH —is what the audience wants.
JEREMY There are wheels within wheels on this. Here’s another wheel: I asked ChatGPT the big question of the show: what do humans want from their machines? It took a long time to come up with an answer, which I think is a testament to the difficulty of the questions on your mind, Ethan. Eventually it spit out this long and, to be honest, sort of bullshitty answer that felt like the kind of answer
you give when you have to write a two-page paper but only have a page and a half of material, so you just sort of cough up everything that’s vaguely relevant.
But there was this kicker at the end: “Overall, humans seek machines that enhance their lives, improve productivity, and offer a better quality of life.” That, according to a machine, is what humans want from machines. Ethan, would you care to respond on behalf of humanity to the machine?
ETHAN Yeah, I’m not sure it’s working. [ Laughter ] Or it’s working in some ways but it’s breaking in some other ways.
JEREMY Well, what is your favorite machine? I’ll give you an example. I have a friend whose favorite invention is the umbrella, because it’s like a little house that you can carry around with you.
ETHAN That is such a good one.
LEIGH Yeah.
“WE HAVE TO BE COLLABORATORS IN OUR OWN EVOLUTION” JEREMY MCCARTER
ETHAN Yeah. I mean, I do like my computer, I’m not lying about that. And I do like my phone. But those aren’t very interesting answers.
JEREMY Well, maybe that is the answer. Smartphones have sucked up all the functions that other machines used to do, that we otherwise would have had a shelf full of gadgets for. But phones are not yet umbrellas, which is why my friend’s answer has not changed.
ETHAN The electric toothbrush is undoubtedly good.
LEIGH Yes.
ETHAN It's purely good.
JEREMY We’re a few minutes closer to showtime. Ethan, what are you doing backstage now?
ETHAN Now, I am singing something from the show and thinking about taking a nap. Everything in me is kind of shutting down, all of the energy is leaving me.
JEREMY You’ve been at this for a minute now. Do you still get butterflies when it’s time to perform?
ETHAN Sure. You know, I was thinking the other day: I had some concept when I started out that the longer I made stuff in the world, the less embarrassed I would get by it, and by myself—by the effort to try and communicate to people. And that turns out not to be true. I’m still just as embarrassed as I ever was. And the only way I know how to deal with that is to embarrass myself again. So, backstage, I’m definitely thinking about embarrassing myself, and hoping it goes okay.
JEREMY The person reading this, I think, is gonna get an extra little flutter of anticipation, reading that.
ETHAN I hope so.
JEREMY What about you, Leigh? At this point, you’ve had so many successful productions all over at every level. Does it ever get to a point where your
confidence and your track record changes the kind of nerves that you bring to a project?
LEIGH No. I think for me, it’s directly related to how much I care. And so, in a way…
ETHAN Not that you ever don’t care, Leigh.
LEIGH No! No, but I think what I feel, on top of the usual things, which is like totally powerless…
ETHAN Helpless.
LEIGH …helpless, I feel complete relief at being anonymous at the back in the dark. But I also feel completely…. It’s a very strange feeling to be a director. Because I think your ability to jump in and fix or stop or improve, or any of those things, it has a sell-by date, in a way. And in the best-case scenario, you really, truly work yourself out of a job. And you stop being the person who knows the most about the show, and actually become the person who knows the least . So I don’t know what’s happening backstage. I can’t.
In fact, when I come back to shows that have been running for some time, I feel that that becomes a different kind of advantage. You go from being like, “OK, it’s gonna be this kind of show, it’s gonna feel like this kind of thing, everybody follow me.” And it’s a process of imparting my vision and collaborating, as people intersect with that vision. And then I come back, and I can see where things have grown, and where things need to shift back, and where things have shifted forward.
So, I think it’s a long way of saying that I practice a kind of… detachment. Or a letting go. So that I can see it afresh, I can see it new, particularly in previews. So that I’m not looking for the things that I love, and know that we need to work on, but that I can be porous and receive what the audience is telling me. And also, so that I can let go of, “Oh, we rehearsed that a million times in rehearsal, I can’t believe they didn’t get it!”
I try and put myself in whatever state I can that will allow that sense of full, open, innocent, audience-
“WE
member-walking-in naivete. Which means I have to practice separating myself from the anxiety that I feel as personal anxiety as the director of the show, but also on behalf of my collaborators.
JEREMY I feel like there must be a succinct Zen term that captures that kind of present detachment.
LEIGH Yes!
JEREMY I don’t know what that term is. I’ll ask ChatGPT later.
LEIGH Let me know.
JEREMY You’ve collaborated on several shows over the years. Do you find that the shorthand gets shorter between the two of you? Or does each time feel like it brings its own set of questions, and you need to find your own way to solve them each time out?
ETHAN Yeah, the shorthand is definitely helpful. It’s also just great to show up at work and have Leigh be there. I was just thinking about how much I just love coming to work and having you be there.
LEIGH Aww.
ETHAN So, we do have this great shorthand. But also with the band, the shorthand can become the thing that’s limiting the next step of growth. The things that we know about each other, the things that we assume about each other, they make things stronger; they make things easier in many ways. And then, if you want to kind of inhabit a new space, you have to find a new shorthand. And that’s really, really fun. But it’s definitely different when I’m on stage than when I’m the playwright. The playwright is a much more tortured position because he has so little control and is really trying to get everyone to see this thing that is only on the inside of his brain, or whatever.
And here, when I’m literally having the playwriting conversation from the stage, I have to try to stay looser. But also, in some ways, there’s something that’s nice about it, because Leigh’s eyes are the only ones on it. There’s lots of things I can’t tell, so I really trust her so much. And it’s also fun for the—you know, the band and I, we play in all these different circumstances. We play concerts, we do this and
that—but for us to have someone else to guide us, other than me, is a relief for all of us, frankly.
JEREMY Do you find that the band, in situations that are not a theater setting, sometimes says, “Can you ask Leigh what she thinks about this?” If they don’t like the answer you’re giving.
ETHAN You know what, we sometimes say, “What would Leigh say?” or “Remember the thing that Leigh talked to us about.” It’s changed our DNA in some ways, working with her. We have brought some of the stage awareness that she has put us in touch with. But then, also, the way that I use text in the band musicals has worked its way into our regular concerts. There’s more story in our regular concerts.
Part of that is my own impulse. But I think part of it is also comes out of a conversation I’ve been having with Leigh over the years about: how do we help people receive this evening? How do we surprise them? How do we connect them? How do we give them enough information? All of those things. She changed the way I thought about crafting an evening of music and words for people.
JEREMY A tricky part about having a conversation that people are going to read right before the show starts, is that so many things I would like to ask you right now would be spoilers. The worst kind of spoilers, cause there’s not even time to forget the thing before the thing happens. So, let me see if I can ask one and we’ll redact the spoiler part. There is a well-known person whose name figures in the show a couple of times.
Did you contemplate using different people there? Or did [ REDACTED ]’s general air of [ REDACTED ]ness make him the only person that was gonna work for those situations?
ETHAN That was my unconscious doing all the work there. I didn’t know when I first wrote him down if it was a throwaway, or if it would come to have meaning. There are a lot of things in the show like that, things that wouldn’t have crawled out of me unless it was this material and these people working on it. And [ REDACTED ], I’ve wanted to say something about, apparently. [ Laughter ]
JEREMY When you’re working on a show about these big, big questions, you can imagine that tonally it could go any number of ways. Is there a point in the process where you decide, “I want to leave the audience feeling this way at the end,” and that becomes a target you’re aiming at? Or does it just sort of organically, all the way to the last period on the last page, become what it wants to become?
ETHAN Do you want me to…
LEIGH Yeah, you go.
ETHAN For me, there’s a direction that I wanna go, and then you learn from it. We did an early workshop of this where I tried some things, and I was like, “That doesn’t feel organic to me.” You hope you’re getting closer and closer to the truth. But I could never prescribe the truth from the very beginning. I know what direction I’m interested in, and then you
find something, and you’re like, “Are we going here?” And then you’re like, “Well, if we’re going here , then this , this , and this .” Or, “That’s not where we should be going.”
With this piece in particular, I knew it was going to handle a lot of dark material. And I felt that I had to offer something. That I was not the best mouthpiece for, “Here’s what’s wrong with AI.” That I had to offer a kind of human thing out of what I had worked through with the material, and that it had to have some value or something.
Not that I’m in any way trying to solve anything, or make people feel a particular way. I just knew that there had to be an offering that came from a generous place in me. And not just a glib place, which I’m more in touch with.
JEREMY Ethan, it’s just about time for you to walk onstage. One last thing before you go. I want you to know that my daughter got a robot dog for her birthday.
ETHAN Oh, yeah.
JEREMY It’s adorable. It could be a little quieter, as the neighbors will attest, but it can play a number of games. One of them is a fortune teller game, where you ask it a question. So we asked it, “Is Ethan’s show going to be a huge hit?” Would you like to know the answer?
ETHAN Yes.
JEREMY Well, it didn’t speak, cause it’s a dog. But it wagged its tail extremely enthusiastically, which I take to be the robot dog way of saying, “box office smash.”
ETHAN, LEIGH Well, we’ll take it.
LEIGH I love that. Where do you get a dog like that? .
JEREMY McCARTER is the co-author of Hamilton: The Revolution (with Lin-Manuel Miranda) and V iewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen (with Jon M. Chu), as well as the author of Young Radicals . He is the founder and executive producer of Make-Believe Association, the acclaimed audio storytelling company. He spent five years on the artistic staff of the Public Theater. He is the literary executor of the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder.
BY DAVID V. FORREST, MD
Let me take you back to 10:56 AM on July 21, 1969, South Vietnam time (2:56 GMT and UTC, 10:56 PM on July 20 EDT), when I was an Army psychiatrist lecturing on abnormal psychology in an extension course for garrison troops in Long Binh. I had interrupted my own lecture by turning on a small black and white TV I had bought at the PX, to show a human stepping onto the moon. I was inwardly celebrating that the most singular event in all human history had just happened, in my lifetime, and I had witnessed it. A human had left the celestial globe of his origin and stepped onto another. But no sooner had Neil Armstrong said “…one giant leap for mankind,” than a young soldier raised his hand and asked, “Is this going to be on the exam?”
In asking what we truly want from our machines, We Are Your Robots prepares us for another epochal event. The play is akin to the models of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming that Richard Dreyfuss feels compelled to build in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in advance of the big reveal of extraterrestrials. We too sense that something important is coming soon. We don’t understand it yet. We can’t imagine its worth. Many of us still think of riches in terms of the compounding fortunes of captains of industry, or Saudi princes pumping Aramco oil, or Native American tribes minting casino money. But Mark Cuban has pointed out that the astounding run of our stock exchanges and America’s economic preeminence in the world are due to the emergence of AI1—so we know where to look in the sky. We are about to receive,
1 Real Time with Bill Maher, HBO, October 19, 2024.
perhaps within the next decade, what we have envied through all our mythologies as divine power. This will be daunting. In being granted not three wishes but an infinite number of unlimited magnitude, humanity will confront a challenging genie.
The sole, rapidly diminishing impediment to this new era is computing power. Until recently, the trajectory formulated in Moore’s Law—that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every 1 1/2 years—allowed for amazing enough advances. But the physicist Michio Kaku writes that the most crucial arms race now is not in mechanical weapons of war, but the race for practical quantum computers, processing on the atomic scale, that will allow users to quickly solve problems that would take today’s best computers until the end of the universe.1 For a start, the winners of this race will have unbreakable codes… and all the rest, no encrypted secrets. In medicine, we will finally “swallow the surgeon” in the form of nanobots, as
1 Kaku, Michio. Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Will Change Everything. Vintage, 2023.
Richard Feynman, photographed in 1984 in the woods of the Robert Treat Paine Estate in Waltham, MA, while he and the photographer worked at Thinking Machines Corporation on the design of the Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2 supercomputer. Photo © Tamiko Thiel, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Permalink
predicted by Nobelist physicist Richard Feynman,2 who envisioned and presaged the potentials of quantum computing in his path integral theory of quantum electrodynamics. The path integral approach employs the almost illimitable power of quantum computing to explore every possible path to solving complex, multistep problems and find the best and most efficient one, which a conventional computer would take forever to do. Think of the chemistry of drug development, for example, now expensive and painstaking. What if a keystroke eliminated all the unrewarding directions?
Unlimited computation will translate to unlimited energy and unlimited wealth. All the world’s wealth ultimately derives from energy from the sun, and we inefficiently extract only 1% from our fuels. Yet plants, by the path integral computation of more than three billion years of evolution, came up with a photosynthesis that is almost 100% efficient at harnessing the energy of sunlight at room temperature. This would be the goal of an artificial leaf, and quantum computers will let us harness this secret without the passage of another three eons.
How will we humans receive such blessings? Proffered untold boons, people grasp at small and proximate things. Winners of multimillion-dollar lotteries plan a new roof for their trailer. Asked what he might want from robots of unlimited capacity, a mathematics teacher who is an imaginative sci-fi reader replied that he would first like a robot to sit in his place at tiresome faculty meetings! Omniscience and omnipotence are incomprehensible to us. People ask, what would Jesus do? But even Jesus didn’t know everything. He asked His Father why he had forsaken him. Soon we will be able to ask, what does God know, and what would God do? If our robots become godlike, will they have our best interest in mind—and if so, what will they do for us? Perhaps we shall not even need to ask. In the military, ideally, a person receiving an order has anticipated the wishes of their superior officer.
How long, though, will we feel we are the superior? What will we do with our envy? In Liu Cixin’s
2 Feynman (1918-1988) first made this remark in a lecture titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics," delivered at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. An abridged version of the lecture was published in the November 1960 edition of Popular Science, under the title "How to Build an Automobile Smaller Than This Dot."
remarkable 2012 short story, “Taking Care of God,” a prior version of humanity returns to Earth after having been coddled by their machines across millennia in “the Age of the Machine Cradle.” Now aged, unable and dependent on us who they created in their image, they offer us seeds of their culture and technology in exchange for our caregiving, but we resent our incapable progenitors and send them away on their spaceships. In Guy Maddin’s new film Rumours , a satire of a clueless, dithering G7 summit of world leaders, when one character, played by Alicia Vikander discovers a giant brain in the surrounding woods, she sets it on fire, immolating herself. Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), involves a rebellion against job-stealing machines, but ends ironically with workers rebuilding the machines they destroyed. My own belief is that we will react passively, like the proverbial frogs in slowly boiling water, to the advance of robots which will win our confidence with conveniences and giveaways. I am moved in that direction from my own study of people happily accepting slot machine gambling. 1 Most people are sheeplike and like the easy way.
Will we find our divine discontent? I have already heard teens tell me they will not need to master any information because of their phones. It is easier to assume education is just memorization than to conceptualize executive function, cross-fertilization of disciplines, and novel synthesis. As robots take over these thinking tasks, we may lie back and let them. The first thing I, in my small mind, would want our
1 SLOTS: Praying to the God of Chance by David M. Forrest, MD. Delphinium/HarperCollins/Open Road Media, 2011.
soon-to-arrive omniscient and omnipotent robots to do, with the unlimited wealth of captured solar energy, is to buy our and the world’s unsustainable debt. Then such things as world peace, and as much immortality as we can stand. But it remains to be seen how we shall react to robots with godlike knowledge and abilities, even those who would follow Asimov’s altruistic rules to save us. 2 Will we become like the Eloi of H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine (1895), completely reliant on the Morlocks who eat them? 3
What are robots to us? The children’s Hallowe’en shop window paintings this year in Rye, N.Y. did not feature the menacing robots I have seen in past years. Nor has Saturday Night Live lately trolled gullible old folks again with a “Robots Are Stealing My Pills” insurance scam skit . Robots are now so familiar that every time we buy online, we must vow the CAPTCHA oath: “I am not a robot.” Video games get ever-better at rendering the hair and skin textures of our avatars without creeping us out in the “uncanny valley” of tooclose-but-still-off resemblance; something about the mouth and teeth keeps them unreal.
We like to project onto robots both our magnanimity and the negative aspects of our nature that scare us.
2 In the influential short stories and novels of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), the “positronic brains” of advanced robots operate in accordance with three immutable laws:
The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
The Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. The Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
3 E.M. Forster's short story “The Machine Stops” (1909), influenced by Wells’ The Time Machine, offers an early representation of mental atrophy in an age of supercomputers.
The term CAPTCHA , coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford, is a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." ( Wikipedia )
Since 1920, when Karel Čapek coined the term in his play R.U.R. , “robots” have provided a template idea for concepts of schizophrenia and autism related to literalness, difficulty with feeling emotions, and lack of social knowledge. From 1987-1994, Star Trek: The Next Generation (to which I was a technical consultant) explored the essence of humanity through the character of the android Mr. Data. While Data had many superhuman capacities, and though it was established that he was “fully functional” sexually, he longed to experience human feelings. He was an admired starship officer but, like his brother Lore, had the capacity for evil with the manipulation of his emotion chip. In 2016, the production company Bad Robot brought us
Poster for a Work Projects Administration (WPA) Marionette Theater production of Karel Čapek's RUR, circa 1935-1939. (Permalink)
An acronym for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), Čapek's play was the first use of the term "robot" to describe articfically manufactured, subordinate persons. "The word robota means literally 'corvée, serf labor', and figuratively 'drudgery, hard work' in Czech and also (more general) 'work, labor' in many Slavic languages." ( Wikipedia)
Westworld , HBO’s dark wish-fulfillment-robot series based on the 1972 Michael Crichton film starring a robotic, and truly scary, Yul Brynner.
But we psychiatrists who are also psychoanalysts like to assess what things mean to us at deeper levels. People often resist our interpretations that one thing is really another, but to tweak the question posed by We Are Your Robots : what do we unconsciously want from our creations? The gorgeously animated 2024 film, The Wild Robot , supplies one answer. The title character Roz is a “helper robot” shipwrecked on a deserted island who tries to find someone to serve. She begins with an orphaned gosling, and eventually saves all the animals on the island while teaching them to tolerate one another. She is explicitly identified as the one who, deep down, we all know unconditionally sacrificed herself for us when we were helpless—and for whom, whether we admit it or not, we all long: "Mother.”
So perhaps, in the end, we want them to be able to control us. Melanie Klein defined an infant’s experience of mother as split between good mother, providing the breast, and bad mother, denying it. Later in healthy development the two projections become one person with both gratifying and curtailing attributes. Part of what we want from a mother is to save ourselves from our more destructive tendencies. Perhaps this is what we want most from a robot too. But as Bertram Lewin explained in his 1950 book The Psychoanalysis of Elation , regression to the oblivious comfort of the infant at its mother’s breast, with no thought of effort, will be even better. .
Dr. David V. Forrest, M.D. is a practicing psychiatrist and Columbia professor. At Princeton he wrote a prizewinning thesis about E.E. Cummings with the poet's help and later was the Founding Editor of SPRING: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society . After med school, residency and psychoanalytic training at Columbia, he ran the largest psychiatric clinic in Vietnam, was decorated with the Bronze Star, and published anthropological studies. He has written on language in psychiatric disorders, consulted to Star Trek, explained alien abduction (as memories under anesthesia), slot machine gambling, the motivations of fine art models, and the neuropsychiatry of humor. He and his wife Lynne Stetson of the New York City Ballet published The Ballet Company Game.
In late-October, Rattlestick Directing Fellow Sammy Zeisel sat down with the band Ethan Lipton (Vocals), Vito Dieterle (Saxophone), Eben Levy (Guitar), and Ian M. Riggs (Double Bass) for half an hour in the gorgeous, secluded courtyard which Rattlestick Theater shares with a church in the West Village. It was an unseasonably warm fall day, remarkably peaceful save for a helicopter that whirred incessantly overhead.
Their conversation has been edited for clarity.
SAMMY ZEISEL So my first question is super basic: how did you guys meet? How did the band become a band?
IAN M. RIGGS So it began, well, Ethan was doing these songs and, Vito, he told me about this acapella singing guy. And I didn't want to go. It sounded embarrassing and awful. This was probably…I don't know what year?
EBEN LEVY The 1840's.
ETHAN LIPTON It was 1832.
VITO DIETERLE 2 minutes ago.
IAN 2001, I think. Yeah, then I think Vito played me a recording of Ethan that he made. And I was like, oh my god, this is…really funny. He can command a room. It's just the attention. And it was acapella, so bold. I cracked up. And then I went and it blew me away. And then Eben eventually joined…
ETHAN I had actually seen Eben play with Ejectrode.
EBEN Oh, wow.
SAMMY Say the name again?
ETHAN Ejectrode. Which is an earlier band of Eben's. And Eben was lead guitar and a rapper, quite skilled in both of those. I thought you were a rock star.
EBEN Instead of the nerd that I actually am.
[ Laughter ]
VITO Yeah I didn't wanna see Ethan for a long time. It sounded, on paper, really bad. And I couldn't get
out of a gig once. I was like, okay, I'll fucking go to this show. I literally avoided it for close to a year.
EBEN I had the same experience seeing you. [ Laughter ]
Gaby said I'm dating this guy, he plays the saxophone, and I was like: booorrrring! And then we went to see you and I was like, oh my god, he's amazing.
VITO I don't know about that. Yeah, so and then finally I showed up to Ethan's show and I was like, oh my god, this is great. And then I started telling Ian about it. And it was the same thing: "No, it sounds terrible!" And it all sort of went like that. And then, I think we basically all were trying to convince him to start a band.
SAMMY So how did it finally happen? Did you sit down and have a conversation? A series of conversations?
EBEN I would posit that it was a band when it was just Ethan singing by himself, and that that's what drew all three of us to it. It was fully realized as a guy singing by himself, acappella, and we were really additive to that thing. I think it became…
ETHAN It became something else.
EBEN Yes, but I think the thing that drew us all to it is in the silence between his verses. We heard all the music that I think he was hearing. Maybe we all heard it a little differently, but I think when he was singing acapella, we all heard the band. Then we had the opportunity to become that band or to become a version of that band.
ETHAN Right.
EBEN And I think that's the thing that the four of us share. A sense for what's lurking in the silence that we can pull out.
SAMMY Can you talk more about that silence? The importance of space in your music?
IAN Yeah. I think it's…in Ethan's acappella…
It's so vulnerable, and there's a power.
It's…I don't know the word.
It's…calming.
I think everyone is allowed to…take a breath.
Because there's space and we're not running away from it.
We're just all existing.
It includes everybody.
SAMMY There's a space to enter.
VITO Yes. Or not.
IAN And it's something that I value anyway, creatively. Transparency and space in all creative things.
EBEN One other thing I'll say about space. Most of our music swings in some way or another. That tends to be the through-line, whether we're playing a country song, or something funky, or a jazz tune, or rock-and-roll song, it all swings.
And you can't swing without space.
SAMMY Well, talk to me about swing. I know it's a technical rhythmic designation. But what is swing? Why swing?
VITO That's like…the hardest question ever. [ Laughter ]
IAN You're gonna get some zen answers.
SAMMY I'm ready for it.
IAN Swing is this right now, man. We're swinging now, baby! [ Laughter ]
ETHAN Swing is this garden. [ More laughter ]
IAN Look at that bush. Yeah. That swings.
No, it's a feel . It's a sort of the quintessential jazz feel, but a lot of music has a swing of sorts. It's just this rhythmic continuum that just…
You get in and it keeps you going. But it's not too…
ETHAN Metronomic.
IAN It breathes.
ETHAN What is the opposite of swing?
IAN Straight. Straight time.
VITO I think this is the hardest thing to answer ever. The only time I've ever heard something that moved me was the answer that our teacher, Arnie Lawrence, gave us at The New School when he just said it's undulation .
IAN Undulation!
ETHAN Undulation, that's the word that sounds like what it is.
VITO I was like, yeah. Okay. Undulation .
But other than that, it's so hard. It's something very hard if not impossible to quantify. Try to plug "swing" into a computer program and see what happens. It's impossible.
ETHAN And, to me, there's something inherently theatrical about swing. It requires participation between everybody and the listener in some way. To
find it, to maintain it, to grow it….
SAMMY It's human.
ETHAN It's human. It's really human, yes. And it's interested in its own humanity, too. It's not trying to be… impervious . It's trying to be open.
SAMMY I love that. You've been a band for over twenty years, right?
IAN Something like that.
SAMMY I'm curious, how do you feel that your relationship to swing, to space, has changed over time? Has it? And do you feel that the world's relationship to it has changed?
IAN Interesting.
ETHAN Wow.
EBEN Hm…
VITO I've always struggled with that anyway because I'm like a throwback. I've always struggled with trying to make what I do valid in a modern context because I'm sort of stuck in the past myself. So it's never changed for me.
It's just sort of a natural thing that I try to incorporate into almost everything.
It's not even a choice at this point.
I've never felt like I was really able to relate to the world as a whole 'cause of that, you know? But I don't care.
If it's good, people will know it.
EBEN One thing that I think is cool about this band, and part of why I think it continues to be a band is
because those things that were true at the beginning are still true. About the swing and the feel and leaving the space and all of that…we have found all of these ways to keep expanding the palette of what that can hold.
ETHAN Because I don't play an instrument, I'm also not limited. If I hear a thing, an idea for a song, in any idiom, I can try to do it. Then these guys can play in any idiom, but the threshold is always, does it sound like us in the end? Is it a song that we can own?
And by this point, that's gone to a lot of different places. But it comes back to something that is actually very specific.
SAMMY That feeling of us-ness.
ETHAN Us-ness, yeah. We just did this show at Lincoln Center where we had an actual 15 piece orchestra and choir, which, for me, was about trying to push this us-ness into a new space. To me, it still felt like us. On drugs.
EBEN On amazing drugs.
ETHAN On the best drugs. [ Laughter ]
SAMMY OK, we only have a couple more minutes, so here's a really quick lightning round. Desert Island Album?
EBEN Public Enemy, Nation of Millions .
ETHAN Willie Nelson, Stardust .
IAN …Unanswerable. I wish I could give you one.
EBEN What comes to mind? It doesn't need to be… just for today!
IAN Alright, alright…
Mingus, Let My Children Hear Music .
[ Pause ]
VITO Miles Ahead , Miles Davis.
SAMMY Love it. OK. Do you guys snack while you rehearse?
ETHAN That's the primary occupation actually. [ Laughter ] There's snacking and then there's thinking about snacking… and then there's play.
SAMMY Ok, so favorite snacks?
ETHAN Yeah, it's sort of whatever Vito is making. Either what he's made for himself and we are covetous of or what he's made and shared with us.
EBEN We're actually an eating society.
IAN Yeah. Food is big. There's a lot of things. Chicken tinga… remember that?
ETHAN There was the shawarma situation.
VITO Oh yeah, the chicken and rice. Yeah…
EBEN Didn't you make scotch eggs for a while?
VITO I tried, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot about that, yeah.
IAN What was the thing? It was weird?
ETHAN Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Aspic.
VITO Aspic.
EBEN This guy made aspic!
ETHAN Gelatin.
IAN And it was good.
EBEN It was very good. You wouldn't think.
ETHAN What did it taste like again?
VITO It was tomato aspic.
EBEN A caper vibe.
ETHAN Yeah…
EBEN Like a tomato jello. With shrimp.
IAN And garlic.
SAMMY Thank you guys. I think we'll end it here… this conversation has been great. I hope that when I play this back….
[ The helicopter sound at this point in the conversation is deafening. ]
EBEN Yeah, you're going to play this back and it's just going to be….
IAN Yeah I mean talking about the world and how the world has changed, I think that space is even more valuable and important.
ETHAN That helicopter does not swing.
VITO The helicopter is the opposite of swing.
SAMMY What is swinging most in this courtyard, would you say?
EBEN Oh that plaque over there with all of the people who have served here for like 50 plus years. There's this cohort of, like, priests and other folks who were here for over 50 years all of them, working together, they're all on that plaque. I think that totally swings. .
SAMMY ZEISEL is a theatre director and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. He recently received his MFA in directing from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University where he was awarded the Julian Milton Kaufman Prize for excellence. As a director, Sammy specializes in contemporary re-imaginings of classics, formally inventive new plays, and experimental solo performance. He is the current directing fellow at Rattlestick Theatre. B.A. Northwestern University. Website: sammyzeisel.com
Algorithm Per Merriam-Webster, a procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation. The term derives from the name of Persian scientist Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (c.780-850 CE). The first computer algorithm, Note G, was written by English mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) for the analytical engine, a digitalmechanical computer designed, but never fully realized, by English polymath Charles Babbage (1791-1871). Today, one's “algorithm” is slang for the tangle of programs used by social media companies and other businesses to anticipate an individual consumers’ tastes and desires based on their data profile.
David Chalmers (b. 1966) Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, best known for formulating “The Hard Problem of Consciousness,” which asks,
“Why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?
François Chollet (b. 1989) French software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher, whose work focuses on computer vision, the application of machine learning to formal reasoning, abstraction, and how to achieve greater generality in artificial intelligence.
Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) American professor, public intellectual, and author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.
Code Plain text instructions by a programmer to control the behavior of a computer, written in a programming language.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Novel by American sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, adapted into the 1982 film Blade Runner and its sequel Blade Runner 2049 . It centers on a bounty hunter attempting to identify and “retire” six renegade androids capable of passing for human; paranoia ensues.
The Eagles American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1971 by Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner. With five numberone singles, including “Best of My Love” and “Hotel California,” six number-one albums, and six Grammy Awards, the Eagles remain one of the world's best-selling music artists.
Faust German folkloric figure, whose pact with the devil—forbidden power, knowledge, and pleasures, in exchange for his soul—gives us the term “Faustian bargain.” Based on an actual Renaissance
alchemist and astrologer, the legend has been adapted by artists including Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann.
“Four out of five dentists surveyed….” Marketing slogan used in commercials for Trident Gum starting in the 1970s: “"Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum." Based (presumably) on a proprietary survey (never released) of D.D.S.’s and D.M.D.’s, it leaves to the viewer’s inference whatever opinion four out of five dentists may hold on the advisability of chewing gum, period.
Reggie Jackson (b. 1946) American former professional baseball right fielder who played 21 seasons for the Kansas City / Oakland Athletics, Baltimore Orioles, New York Yankees, and California Angels. Jackson was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1993.
Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) Norwegian author, best known for a series of six unsparingly candid autobiographical novels titled— provocatively— Min Kamp ( My Struggle ).
Donald Knuth (b. 1938) American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. In 1968, the first volume of Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming was published; the work, which remains ongoing at four volumes (of a projected seven), was dubbed by The New York Times "the profession's defining treatise.”
Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) Ukrainian-born Brazilian fiction writer and journalist. A major literary figure in Brazil for her deeply introspective, stylistically daring short stories and novels, her biographer Benjamin Moser has also described her
Sergey Surkov and Melia dancing a pasodoble at the 2010 World Latin Cup. Photo © Elena Zaychikovna, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Permalink
as “the most important Jewish writer in the world since Franz Kafka.”
“Mencolek” Indonesian word defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “to touch gently with something soft or moist,” and by impish denizens of the English-speaking internet as "to tap someone on the shoulder while standing on their opposite side.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Austrian composer of more than 800 operas, concertos, symphonies, and other works, widely considered to be among the foremost geniuses in the history of Western music. A conjectured rivalry with fellow composer Antonio Salieri, culminating in Mozart’s untimely death, is the basis of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus and its 1984 film adaptation starring Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham.
Thomas Nagel (b. 1937) American philosopher best known for his 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The essay argues that, as "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism— something it is like for the organism,” it would be impossible for a human being "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat."
Nanobots Machines or robots ranging in size from 0.1 to 10 micrometres and constructed of nanoscale or molecular components. Still largely theoretical or in early development, they hold enormous potential in the fields of medicine, energy and environmental science, and may pose catastrophic risks, i.e., the grey goo scenario.
Panpsychism The belief that all things have a consciousness, i.e. that the mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is one of the oldest philosophical theories, ascribed in some form to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell.
Pasodoble Spanish dance and musical form dating to the 18th century. Originally a genre of up-tempo military march, it later became associated with bullfighting and Spanish popular theatre, and is today primarily danced at weddings and on the competitive ballroom circuit.
Qualia In the philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. Philosopher Daniel Dennett described qualia as “the ways things seem to us."
Robot Per Merriam-Webster, a machine that resembles a living creature in being capable of moving independently and performing complex actions, or a device that automatically performs complicated, often repetitive tasks. The word robota , meaning “work” in several Slavic languages, was given its modern sense by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his 1920 play R.U.R. ( Rossum's Universal Robots ).
Roomba Brand of autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners made by the company iRobot. Developed by engineer Joe Jones while working at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the first generation of Roombas hit the market in 2002. Using cameras and infrared sensors, Roombas “map” the areas they are assigned to clean.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Irish playwright, critic, and political activist. A Nobel Laureate in Literature, he is remembered for both his wittily satirical plays, which continue to be
regularly revived, and his polemical writing in support of Fabian socialism and other causes, noble (e.g. women’s suffrage) and ignoble (eugenics).
Singularity Hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth will become uncontrollable, with unpredictable results. The concept and term were popularized by American science fiction author Vernor Vinge (1944-2024), whose 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity” anticipated that a superintelligence with the ability to upgrade itself would advance at an incomprehensible rate, and signal the end of the human era. He added that he would be surprised if this occurred before 2005 or after 2030.
Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970) Album produced by American bio-acoustician Roger Payne (1935-2023) consisting of the elaborate vocalizations of humpback whales. Selling over 100,000 copies, it helped spawn a worldwide "Save The Whales" movement. An excerpt was included on the Voyager Golden Record carried aboard the two Voyager program interstellar probes.
Star Wars Entertainment franchise and global cultural phenomenon that began with the 1977 film of the same name , concerning the struggle between resistance fighters and an evil empire "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Along with Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Chewbacca, the franchise's iconic characters include robot “droids” R2-D2 and C-3PO.
The Tempest (ca. 1610-1611) Play by William Shakespeare, generally believed to be one of the final works bearing his sole authorship. Its story of a sorcerous exiled duke and his manipulation of an island’s strange inhabitants has inspired countless works of art, including the 1956 sci-fi film Forbidden Planet featuring Robby the Robot.
Watson Pioneering IBM computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. Developed by a research team led by David Ferrucci , Watson was “trained” to compete in the trivia game show Jeopardy, and rose to fame in 2011 by defeating two champions of the game in a series of televised matches. Its subsequent uses have included medical diagnostics, tax preparation, and writing recipes for regionally distinctive poutines.
ETHAN LIPTON & HIS ORCHESTRA is a quartet featuring Eben Levy (guitar), Ian Riggs (bass), Vito Dieterle (sax) and Ethan Lipton (vocals) that has been making music for 20 years. Ethan writes the songs and the band arranges them as a quartet. Eben and Ian also contribute underscoring. Theatrical productions include the band musicals No Place to Go (Obie Award) and The Outer Space (Lortel nom.), both produced by the Public Theater at Joe’s Pub and directed by Leigh Silverman, and In Praise of the Unlived Life , for Live From the NYPL. The band has released five studio albums, including this year’s Did You Do The Thing We Talked About? , and appeared on "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” In addition to playing all over NYC, the band has performed concerts at venues including SF Jazz, Celebrate Brooklyn, MASS MoCa, Pitchfork Paris, Theatre de la Ville, the Gate (London), the Troubadour (LA), and most recently at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall accompanied by a 15-piece orchestra and a choir. More info at www.ethanlipton.com .
VITO DIETERLE (Saxophone, Composition and Arrangements) has played throughout New York and regularly leads his own quartet at venues such as the Roxy Hotel, Saint Tuesday and Midnight Blue (performance schedule on IG @viterle ). Vito has played Little Branch weekly since 2005 and curates that venue’s music program, as well as the music programs of festivals in NYC and around the country. Other duties for Ethan Lipton & His Orchestra include melodica, flute, organ, backup vocals and conjuror of frittata.
EBEN LEVY (Guitar, Composition and Arrangements) is a founding member of the cult 90’s funk band Chucklehead, which still reanimates here and there. Eben has composed and produced music for numerous film, television and stage productions. Departments with Ethan Lipton & his Orchestra include backup vocals, beats, engineering, and minister of gear.
Levy in We Are Your Robots . Photo by Hollis King.
ETHAN LIPTON (Vocals, Book, Lyrics, Composition and Arrangements) writes plays and songs. Theater productions include Tumacho , Red-Handed Otter , Luther , Goodbye April Hello May , 100 Aspects of the Moon , and Meat . Ethan is the 2023 Kleban Prize winner for librettists and a 2023 Creative Capital Grantee. He’s been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alpert Prize Fellow at MacDowell, a Clubbed Thumb associate artist, a part of the Public’s Emerging Writers Group, a Ryder Farm Fellow and a Playwrights Realm Page One Fellow. Plays published by Concord Theatricals. Band duties include herder of cats.
IAN M. RIGGS (Double Bass, Composition and Arrangements) has been making music in NYC and the DC area for over two decades. Ian has subbed on Broadway for Mean Girls and Paramour (Cirque du Soleil), and toured with Burning Spear (Hollywood Bowl) and the Lonesome Trio (Bonnarroo). Positions with Ethan Lipton & His Orchestra include backup vocals, keyboard, acoustic guitar and chairman of the chords.
LEIGH SILVERMAN (Director) World Premieres with Ethan Lipton include The Outer Space and No Place to Go , both produced by the Public Theater at Joe’s Pub, and Tumacho (Clubbed Thumb). Broadway: Yellow Face (Roundabout); Suffs (Tony nom); Violet (Tony nom); Grand Horizons (2ST; Williamstown Theater Festival); The Lifespan of a Fact ; Chinglish ; Well (Public; ACT; Longacre). Select off-Broadway: Merry Me (NYTW); Suffs (Public); The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (Shed, CTG); Hurricane Diane (NYTW); Harry Clarke (West End, Berkeley Rep, Vineyard/Audible; Lortel nom); Sweet Charity (New Group). Encores: Violet ; The Wild Party ; Really Rosie Dykes To Watch Out For (Audible).
LEE JELLINEK (Scenic Designer). Broadway: Oklahoma! (Tony & Drama Desk nominations, Obie Award); Mary Jane ; Sea Wall / A Life ; Marvin’s Room Off-Broadway: The Best We Could (MTC); The Antipodes , Everybody (Signature); The Ally , Buzzer (The Public); Mary Page Marlowe (2ST); Mary Jane (NYTW); Rags Parkland… (Ars Nova); The Wolves , Queens (LCT); Heroes … , Corsicana , The Treasurer , Marjorie Prime (Playwrights Horizons); A Life (Playwrights Horizons, Lortel & Hewes Awards); Small Mouth Sounds (Ars Nova, Signature, National Tour); The Debate Society, The Mad Ones. Regional Opera. Other: Obie for Sustained Excellence in Design. Education: MFA, NYU.
ALEJO VIETTI (Costume Designer) New York: Broadway: Allegiance (Drama Desk nomination), Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (West End Olivier nomination, Japan, Australia, UK tour and U.S. national tour), Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn . Currently: Titanique (Lucille Lortel Award, also Australia and Canada). Works for Roundabout Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage, Atlantic Theatre, NY Theatre Workshop, Radio City Rockettes, City Center’s Encore, New Group, NY City Opera, and more. Also, Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (Japan, Germany and Austria), West Side Story World tour, and works for Lyric Opera of Chicago, Donesk Opera (Ukraine), Colorado Ballet among others. Recipient of the 2010 TDF/Irene Sharaff Young Master Award. Instagram @alejo_vietti_costume_design .
ADAM HONORÉ (Lighting Designer) is a Harlem based designer for the stage. Broadway: Purlie Victorious , Ain’t No Mo’ , Chicken & Biscuits . Off-Broadway: Cats, The Jellicle Ball (PAC NYC); Jelly’s Last Jam (City Center); Carmen Jones (Classic Stage Co). Regional: Empire Records (McCarter); Gun & Powder (Paper Mill); Trading Places (Alliance). Nominations: Drama Desk, Henry Hewes, Helen Hayes. @itsadamhonore
NEVIN STEINBERG (Sound Designer) TFANA and Rattlestick debut! Broadway: The Notebook , Sweeney Todd 2023 Revival (Tony Award), Tina: The Tina Turner Musical (Tony nomination), Hadestown (Tony Award), Hamilton , Dear Evan Hansen , Freestyle Love Supreme , The Cher Show , Bandstand , Bright Star , It Shoulda Been You , Mothers and Sons , Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella (Tony nomination), The Performers . Over thirty other Broadway productions with Acme Sound Partners and five additional Tony nominations: The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess , Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo , Fences , Hair , In The Heights .
KATHERINE FREER (Projection Designer) is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, organizer, and educator whose artistic practice lives at the intersection of story, technology, and civic engagement. Frequent collaborators include Ping Chong, Ty Defoe, Kamilah Forbes, Steve H. Broadnax III, Lux Haac, Porsche McGovern, Liza Jessie Peterson, Talvin Wilks, and Tamilla Woodard. She is a proud member of Wingspace Theatrical Design and United Scenic Artists, Local USA 829, a core collaborator in All My Relations Collective, and Head of the Integrated Media Program at the University of Texas at Austin. @k8tefree
JON KNUST (Properties Supervisor) Selected credits include: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Broadway); Waiting for Godot , Des Moines , The Merchant of Venice , Gnit , The Winter's Tale , T he Skin of Our Teeth , About Alice , The Father , and A Doll’s House (TFANA); We Live In Cairo (NYTW); A Bright New Boise , Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek , Big Love and Appropriate (Signature); and Peter and the Starcatcher (tour). Jon got his start in props at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University.
CAROLINE ENGLANDER (Production Stage Manager). Broadway: King Lear with Glenda Jackson. Off Broadway/Regional: Find Me Here , Deep Blue Sound (Clubbed Thumb); Helen (En Garde Arts); Half-God of Rainfall (ART, NYTW); The Jungle (St.Ann’s Warehouse, STC); Becky Nurse of Salem (LCT); Hamlet , Oresteia (Park Avenue Armory); The Vagrant Trilogy , The Outer Space , The Great Immensity , The Apple Family Plays (NYSF/Public Theater); sandblasted (Vineyard/WP Theater); runboyrun , In Old Age (NYTW); The Courtroom (Waterwell). Many productions with NYU Tisch Graduate Acting. BA: Barnard College.
ZACH BRECHEEN (Assistant Stage Manager) is an NYC based Stage Manager. Broadway: The Hills of California , Mother Play , Sweeney Todd . Off-Broadway: KATE (Connelly Theater); Less Lonely (Greenwich House); HalfGod of Rainfall (New York Theatre Workshop); Oliver! (NYCC Encores!); Stereophonic , Catch as Catch Can , Corsicana , Tambo & Bones (Playwrights Horizons).
BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES (Press Representative) is a Brooklyn-based public relations firm representing arts organizations and cultural institutions. Clients include St. Ann’s Warehouse, Playwrights Horizons, Signature Theatre, Soho Rep, National Sawdust, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, PEN America, StoryCorps, Symphony Space, the Fisher Center at Bard, Peak Performances, Irish Arts Center, the Merce Cunningham Trust, the Onassis Foundation, Taylor Mac, Page 73, The Playwrights Realm, PlayCo and more.
Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director Dorothy Ryan, TFANA is a New York City home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights.
TFANA explores the ever-changing forms of world theatre and creates a dialogue between the language and ideas of Shakespeare and diverse authors, past and present. TFANA also builds associations with artists from around the world and supports their development through commissions, translations, and residencies.
In 2001, TFANA became the first American theatre invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in 2007, TFANA returned to the RSC. In 2025, TFANA will tour its production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice starring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock and directed by Arin Arbus to the Royal Lyceum Theatre of Edinburgh, Scotland.
TFANA performs for audiences of all ages and backgrounds; is devoted to economically accessible tickets and promotes humanities and education programs. TFANA has played on Broadway, Off Broadway and toured internationally and nationally. In 2013, It opened its first permanent home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center (PSC), Brooklyn, with the 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage and the 50-seat Theodore Rogers Studio.
Founded in 1994, RATTLESTICK THEATER has been steadfast in producing diverse, provocative, and expansive new work to foster the future voices of the American theater. From its historic West Village theater, Rattlestick has produced the first plays and early works of some of today’s leading voices, including Martyna Majok ( Ironbound ), Diana Oh ( mylingerieplay ), and Heidi Schreck ( There Are No More Big Secrets ). Rattlestick is where some of our nation’s most celebrated playwrights are encouraged to test their boldest ideas, including Dael Orlandersmith ( Until the Flood ), José Rivera ( Massacre , Sing to Your Children ), and Samuel D. Hunter ( Lewiston/ Clarkston , nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and the Outer Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play). www.rattlestick.org
ACTORS' EQUITY ASSOCIATION (“Equity”) , founded in 1913, is the U.S. labor union that represents more than 50,000 actors and stage managers. Equity seeks to foster the art of live theatre as an essential component of society and advances the careers of its members by negotiating wages and working conditions and providing a wide range of benefits including health and pension plans. Actors’ Equity is a member of the AFL-CIO and is affiliated with FIA, an international organization of performing arts unions. #EquityWorks
Assistant Director................................. Elizabeth Bennett
Associate Scenic Designer.................................... Ant Ma
Assistant Costume Designer......................... Gail Baldoni
Assistant Lighting Designer..................... Shannon Clarke
Associate Sound Designer........................ Anna-Lee Craig
Assistant Sound Designer.............................. Jamie Davis
Associate Projection Designer...................... Nitsan Scharf
Ableton Programmer………................. Scott Wasserman
Assistant Ableton Programmer…………….. Sharon Ahn
Robotics Consultant........................ Nialah Wilson-Small
Riggers......... Cory Asinofsky, Helen Hylton, Tobias Segal
Lead Carpenter........................................... Ellie Engstrom
Carpenters.... Cory Asinofsky, Steven Cepeda, Daniel Cohen, Jules Conlon, Helen Hylton, Tobias Segal, Jack Spalding, Henry Witherow-Culpepper
Scenic Artists................... Hannah Birch-Carl, Ava Rand, Chelsea Smith-Dougherty
Properties Artisan.................... Chelsea Smith-Dougherty
Scenic Painter................................................... Ava Rand
Head Electrician....................................... Michael Cahill
Electricians........... Blaize Adler-Ivanbrook, Rhylke Caputo, DJ Fralin, Lillian Hilmes, Tony Mulanix, Alex Nemfakos
Production Audio................................................. Sam Henry
Assistant Production Audio.............................. Jeffrey Rowell
Audio Technicians.................. Brett Orenstein, Joseph Parisi, Jose Rivas, Alex Baylard, Brian Anner, Cory Lippert, Matthew Good, Jackson Martel, Jonathan Stutz, Rudy Bearden, Nitu Singh, Joshua Widenbaum, Rocky Sahadeo, Nicholas Ray
Production Video................................ Daniel Santamaria
Front of House Audio Mixer......................... Jamie Davis
Microphone Engineer.................... Emilia Wojciechowski
Deck Carpenter................................ Tristan Viner-Brown
Light Board Programmer and Operator...... Paul Kennedy
Wardrobe Supervisor................................ Kristi D’Arrigo
Additional Scenic Pieces Provided by Daedalus Design& Production, Rose Brand Video Equipment Provided by 4Wall Entertainment
Additional Lighting Equipment Provided by PRG Sound Equipment Provided by Masque Sound Additional Sound Equipment Provided by FiveOHM Productions
Theatre for a New Audience, Rattlestick Theater, and the production of We Are Your Robots acknowledge the wonderful support of 4Wall Entertainment and project manager Michael Lord in realizing the video design of this production.
The Dieterle family and Stevie; Leo, Hazel and Cate; Arin, Bird and family; Drew Riggs, Elizabeth Wesley, Pete Rubens, Cristina Carlson, Susan Martin & Alan Belzer.
WILL DAVIS (Artistic Director) As a director and choreographer, his work has been seen Off-Broadway at Signature Theatre, City Center, Roundabout Theatre, MTC, MCC, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, and Soho Rep. Regionally, his work has been seen at La Jolla Playhouse, Baltimore Center Stage, Shakespeare Theater Company, Long Wharf Theatre and ATC in Chicago where Davis previously served as Artistic Director. He received a Helen Hayes award for best direction for his work on Colossal at the Olney Theatre Center, was nominated for a Lucille Lortel award for his direction of Men on Boats at Playwrights Horizons, and is the recipient of a Princeton Arts Fellowship.
MAEGAN MORRIS (Managing Director) has spent her career supporting and promoting theater artists. She was last at Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, where she served as the Contract Affairs Representative for Off-Broadway, Northeast regional theaters, national tours and summer stock across the US. Previously, she was a theatrical and choreography agent at Bloc Talent Agency. A third generation native New Yorker, she holds a BA from Middlebury College and currently resides in Brooklyn with her husband and two kids.
KATE EMINGER (Associate Artistic Director) is a director and creative leader with a strong focus on new play development. Kate has built a career that spans arts leadership and directing roles at institutions such as La Jolla Playhouse and SPACE on Ryder Farm. With an MFA in Directing from The New School, she is committed to fostering opportunities for artists and audiences.
STAFF
Artistic Director Will Davis
Managing Director Maegan Morris
Associate Artistic Director Kate Eminger
Technical Theater Manager Filippo De Capitani
Marketing Director Matt Ketai
Digital Media Coordinator Kerri Gaudelli
Operations & Outreach Coordinator Jo Wiegandt
Accountants
Management Services
Richard E. Cohen, CPA & Blitzer Gelfand & Cohen, PC
Lucille Lortel Theatre Foundation
Development Consultant Advance NYC
Press Agent John Wyszniewski, Everyman Agency
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Chair Jeff Thamkittikasem
Vice Chair Robert Lomison
Vice Chair Jen Swidler
Treasurer Bruce Lovett
Secretary Raymond Brunt
Daryl Boren, Faith Catlin, Cusi Cram, Matt D'Amico, Mari Foster, Doug Nevin, Steven Phillips, Susan Strickler, Alana Weiss
Advisory Committee
Nina Adams, Nadia Alia, Sonja Berggren, Kathleen Chalfant, Robert Clauser, Phyllis T Goldman, Sandra Coudert Graham, Willy Holtzman, Dan Markley, Annie Middleton, Dael Orlandersmith, Andrew Polk, Robert Pollock, Alysia Reiner, Leigh Silverman, Keith Randolph Smith, Wendy vanden Heuvel, Anna Ziegler
2024-2025 RATTLESTICK ARTISTS & FELLOWS
Andrew W. Mellon National Playwright in Residence Basil Kreimendahl
Terrence McNally New Works Fellows
Jesse Jae Hoon, Sam Mueller, Eliana Theologides Rodriguez
Van Lier New Voices Fellows
Alex Lin, kanishk pandey
Directing Fellow Sammy Zeisel
Rattlestick Theater is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Rattlestick Theater's programs are also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORTERS
Rattlestick Theater extends our immense thanks to the following foundations for their generous support of our mission:
Actors' Equity Foundation, Axe-Houghton Foundation, The Ellen M. Violett and Mary P.R. Thomas Foundation, Ford Foundation, Frederic R. Coudert Foundation, Georganne Aldrich Heller Foundation, Greg and Mari Marchbanks Foundation: Horton Foote Prize, The Hyde and Watson Foundation, The John Golden Fund, The Lucille Lortel Foundation, MacArthur Family Charitable Foundation, Nancy Friday Foundation, New Tamarind Foundation, The NYU Community Fund, Select Equity Group Foundation, The SHS Foundation, Still Point Fund, Stolbun Family Foundation, The Terrence McNally Foundation, The Tow Foundation
COMMUNITY
(from 8/1/23 through 10/18/24)
Anonymous Donor
Kyle Abourizk
Nina Adams & Moreson H. Kaplan
Louis A. Alexander*
Vincent Alfieri
Ars Nova Entertainment
Bob Atchison
Jerry Austin
Erica Barnes
Bert E. Barnett, Jr. & Carol N. Barnett
The Victor and Clara C. Battin Foundation
Rahul Bedi
Sonja Berggren & Patrick Seaver
Sheila Bernard
Susan Bernfield
Randi Berry
Tim Bloom
Stephen Bogardus & Dana Moore
Daryl & Joe Boren
Dipti Bramhandkar
Miriam Brody
Raymond & Pam Brunt
Jennifer Burkholder
Sally Cartaya
Caitlin Nasema Cassidy
Faith Catlin
Robert Clauser
Stephanie Anne Connor
Peg Correa
Sandra Coudert Graham
Matt D'Amico
Darnell-Moser Charitable Fund
Raymond Davis
Steven Dawson
Leah Day
Wednesday Derrico
Jill Dolan & Stacy Wolf
Alex Draper
Ethan Dubin
Christian Duhamel
Benjamin Dunlap
Phyllis Eckhaus
William P. Eddy
Robert Eddy & Juan Herrera
Gordon Edelstein
John C. Eisner & Jennifer Dorr White
Halley Feiffer
R. Feinberg
Emily Feldman
Concetta Filippi
Emmie Finckel
Lori & Edward Forstein*
Mari Foster
Elizabeth Frankel
Kent Gash
Philip Gelston
Sara Glass
Jason J. & Erin Lynn Golis
Google LLC
Fell Gray*
Colin & Frances Greer
Jennie Greer & Simon Kendall
Alice & Robin Griffiths
Hugh & Jennifer Smith Grubb
James Hadfield & Willard Grace
Miranda Hall
Jack Hamilton
Ginger Harris
Tim Hausmann
Mitchell & Janice Heine
Alex Heine
Suzanna Hermans*
Rodney Hicks
Michael Hirschhorn & Jimena Martinez
Libby & Tom Hollahan
William Holtzman & Sylvia Shepard
Brigid Howse
Jess Hutchinson*
Stephen Johns
Mary & Gregory Juedes
John Jusino
John Karrel
Robert & Nina Kaufelt
MJ Kaufman
Abe Koogler
Ellen Koskoff
Bridget & Elliot Krowe
Emily Lancaster
Brian Leffler
David Lerner & Lorren Erstad
Louis Lobel
Robert Lomison & Drew Cross
Bruce Lovett
Gina MacArthur*
Karen Malone
Linnea Masson
Jill Hunter Matichak
Cynthia Mayeda
Kelly McAndrew
Emily McCully*
John McDermott
Molly McEneny
Lisa Miller
Mike Milov-Cordoba
Marcia Mishico
Stephen Mishjko
Mary Beth & John Mortiz
Rebecca Morris
Kathy Muenz
Anastazia Neely
Doug Nevin
Rachel O'Neill
Amy Oshinsky
Michael Paller
Kim Powers
Alba Quezada
Barbara Raab*
Ron Rafay
Joshua Cooper Ramo & Nora Abousteit
Bobbin Ramsey
Keith Randolph Smith*
Betty P. Rauch
Rebel Productions, Inc
Ronald & Lynne Reinhard
Karen Reiter
Donny Repsher
Máxima Rodas
Bryson Rogers
Christopher Romano
Aaron Rossini
Kennon V. Rothchild
William Russell
Heidi & Eric Salter
Carl Schnedeker
Mark Schwarz
Richard P. Seeger
Dan Shaheen
David Shane
Nora Sharp
Adam Sheer
Jayne Baron Sherman
Emily Sides
Carol Sigmond
Christopher Slowik
Niegel Smith
Robyn Stowell
Sarah Stowell*
Susan A. Strickler & Richard P. Kaye
Stinson Stroup
R. Lee Stump & Abigail Roth*
James Suskin
Tom Swartele
Jen Swidler
Jerilyn Tabor & Patrick Montgomery*
Randy Taplin
Glennda Testone
Jeff Thamkittikasem & Liz Gilroy
Ted Thompson
Eric Ting
Christian Titze
Jonathan Tolins
Diane & Warren Traiger*
Amy Trommer & Jon Freedman
Wendy vanden Heuvel
Marian von Noppen
Kim Weild
Sydelle & Andy Weinberger
Chantal Weinman
Marcia Wernick
Lynne Whitman & Dan Solender*
David Wilson Barnes
Michael Wright
Scott Ross
Mason Xiao
Karma Zaike
White Mountains Capital, Inc.
*Denotes Rattlestick Patron Program Members
JEFFREY HOROWITZ (Founding Artistic Director) began his career in theatre as an actor and appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theatre. In 1979, he founded Theatre for a New Audience. Horowitz has served on the panel of the New York State Council on the Arts, on the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group, the advisory board of the Shakespeare Society and the artistic directorate of London’s Globe Theatre. Awards: 2003 John Houseman Award from The Acting Company, 2004 Gaudium Award from Breukelein Institute, 2019 Obie Lifetime Achievement and TFANA’s 2020 Samuel H. Scripps.
DOROTHY RYAN (Managing Director) joined Theatre for a New Audience in 2003 after a ten-year fundraising career with the 92nd Street Y and Brooklyn Museum. Ryan began her career in classical music artist management and also served as company manager and managing leader for several regional opera companies. She is a Brooklyn Women of Distinction honoree and serves as treasurer of the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance.
CHLOE KNIGHT (General Manager) is a graduate of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale’s Theater Management program, and recipient of Yale’s 2024 Morris J. Kaplan Prize in Theater Management. Knight has served as Associate Managing Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, assistant to the president of LORT, CoManaging Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret, Company Manager at Yale Rep, and Management Fellow at Lincoln Center Theater. Before earning her MFA, she held myriad fundraising positions at Page 73, consulting firm Advance NYC, and The Lark.
Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director Dorothy Ryan, TFANA is a New York City home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. TFANA explores the ever-changing forms of world theatre and creates a dialogue between the language and ideas of Shakespeare and diverse authors, past and present. TFANA also builds associations with artists from around the world and supports their development through commissions, translations, and residencies.
Founding Artistic Director
Jeffrey Horowitz
Managing Director Dorothy Ryan
General Manager Chloe Knight
Director of Institutional Advancement
James J. Lynes
Finance Director Mary Sormeley
Education Director Lindsay Tanner
Director of Marketing & Communications
Eddie Carlson
Facilities Director Rashawn Caldwell
Production Manager Brett Anders
Technical Director Joe Galan
Associate Director of Development
Sara Billeaux
Artistic Associate Peter J. Cook
Associate Producer Allison Benko
Company Manager Molly Burdick
Theatre Manager Lawrence Dial
Box Office Manager Allison Byrum
Marketing Manager Angela Renzi
Education Manager Emma Griffone
Institutional Giving Associate Madison Wetzell
Finance Associate Harmony Fiori
Development Associate Suzanne Lenz
Development Associate Gavin McKenzie
Facilities Associate Tim Tyson
Archivist Shannon Resser
New Deal Program Coordinator Zhe Pan
TFANA Teaching Artists
Matthew Dunivan, Melanie Goodreaux, Albert Iturregui-Elias, Margaret Ivey, Elizabeth London, Erin McCready, Marissa Stewart, Kea Trevett
House Managers
Nancy Gill Sanchez, Denise Ivanov, Regina Pearsall
Press Representative
Blake Zidell & Associates
Resident Director Arin Arbus
Resident Casting Director Jack Doulin
Resident Dramaturg Jonathan Kalb
Resident Distinguished Artist
John Douglas Thompson
Resident Voice and Text Director
Andrew Wade
TFANA Council of Scholars
Tanya Pollard, Chair
Jonathan Kalb, Alisa Solomon, Ayanna Thompson
Concessions Sweet Hospitality Group
Legal Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton
Accounting: Sax LLP
In 2001, TFANA became the first American theatre invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in 2007, TFANA returned to the RSC. In 2025, TFANA will tour its production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice starring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock and directed by Arin Arbus to the Royal Lyceum Theatre of Edinburgh, Scotland.
TFANA performs for audiences of all ages and backgrounds; is devoted to economically accessible tickets and promotes humanities and education programs. TFANA has played on Broadway, Off Broadway and toured internationally and nationally. In 2013, It opened its first permanent home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center (PSC), Brooklyn, with the 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage and the 50-seat Theodore Rogers Studio.
Theatre for a New Audience’s education programs introduce students to Shakespeare and other classics with the same artistic integrity that we apply to our productions. Through our unique and exciting methodology, students engage in hands-on learning that involves all aspects of literacy set in the context of theatre education. Our residencies are structured to address City and State Learning Standards both in English Language Arts and the Arts, the New York City DOE’s Curriculum Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Theater, and the New York State Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts. Begun in 1984, our programs have served more than 140,000 students, ages 9 through 18, in New York City Public Schools city-wide.
Theatre for a New Audience’s home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is a centerpiece of the Brooklyn Cultural District.
Designed by celebrated architect Hugh Hardy, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is the first New York City theatre conceived and built for classic drama since Lincoln Center’s 1965 Vivian Beaumont. The 27,500-square-foot facility is a uniquely flexible performance space. The 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, inspired by the Cottesloe at London’s National Theatre, combines an Elizabethan courtyard theatre with modern theatre technology. It allows the stage and seating to be reconfigured for each production. The facility also includes the Theodore C. Rogers Studio (a 50-seat rehearsal/performance studio), and theatrical support spaces. The City of New York-developed Arts Plaza, designed by landscape architect Ken Smith, creates a natural gathering place around the building. In addition, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is also one of the few sustainable (green) theatres in the country, with LEED-NC Silver rating from the United States Green Building Council.
Now with a home of its own, Theatre for a New Audience is contributing to the continued renaissance of Downtown Brooklyn. In addition to its season of plays, the Theatre has expanded its Humanities offerings to include lectures, seminars, workshops, and other activities for artists, scholars, and the general public. When not in use by the Theatre, its new facility is available for rental, bringing much needed affordable performing and rehearsal space to the community.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Board Chair
Robert E. Buckholz
Vice Chair
Kathleen C. Walsh
President
Jeffrey Horowitz
FoundingArtisticDirector
Vice President and Secretary
Dorothy Ryan
Managing Director
Executive Committee
Alan Beller
Robert E. Buckholz
Constance Christensen
Jeffrey Horowitz
Seymour H. Lesser
Larry M. Loeb
Philip R. Rotner
Kathleen C. Walsh
Josh Weisberg
Members Arin Arbus*
John Berendt*
Bianca Vivion Brooks*
Ben Campbell
Robert Caro*
Jonathan R. Donnellan
Sharon Dunn*
Matthew E. Fishbein
Riccardo Hernandez*
Kathryn Hunter*
Dana Ivey*
Tom Kirdahy*
John Lahr*
Harry J. Lennix*
Catherine Maciariello*
Marie Maignan*
Audrey Heffernan Meyer*
Alan Polonsky
Dorothy Ryan
Joseph Samulski*
Doug Steiner
Michael Stranahan
John Douglas Thompson*
John Turturro*
Frederick Wiseman*
*Artistic Council
Emeritus
Francine Ballan
Sally Brody
William H. Burgess III
Caroline Niemczyk
Janet C. Olshansky
Theodore C. Rogers
Mark Rylance*
Daryl D. Smith
Susan Stockel
Monica G.S. Wambold
Jane Wells
September 1, 2023 – October 1, 2024
Even with capacity audiences, ticket sales account for a small portion of our operating costs. Theatre for a New Audience wishes to thank the following donors for their generous support toward our Annual Campaign. For a list of donors $250 and above, go to www.tfana.org/annualdonors
PRINCIPAL BENEFACTORS
($100,000 and up)
The Bay and Paul Foundations
The Marlène Brody Foundation
City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs
Constance Christensen
The Ford Foundation
Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund at The New York Community Trust
National Endowment for the Humanities
The SHS Foundation
The Shubert Foundation, Inc.
The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc.
LEADING BENEFACTORS
($50,000 and up)
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine
Deloitte & Touche LLP
The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund
The Howard Gilman Foundation, Inc.
The Stockel Family Foundation
The Tow Foundation
The Whiting Foundation
MAJOR BENEFACTORS
($20,000 and up)
The Arnow Family Fund
The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation
Sally Brody
Ben Campbell and Yiba Ng
The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation
The George Link Jr. Foundation
Ashley Garrett and Alan Jones
Agnes Gund
The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust
The Hearst Corporation
Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia
Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP
Latham & Watkins LLP
Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer
National Endowment for the Arts
New York State Council on the Arts
New York State Urban Development Corporation
The Polonsky Foundation
The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation
The Starry Night Fund
Douglas C. Steiner
Kimbrough Towles and George Loening
Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein
The White Cedar Fund
SUSTAINING BENEFACTORS
($10,000 and up)
Anonymous (2)
Peggy and Keith Anderson
Christine Armstrong and Benjamin Nickoll
Ritu and Ajay Banga
Alan Beller
Jacqueline Bradley and Clarence Otis
Dominique Bravo and Eric Sloan
Jill and Jay Bernstein
Elaine and Norman Brodsky
Carlson Family Fund
Michele and Martin Cohen
Matt Fishbein and Gail Stone
M. Salome Galib and Duane McLaughlin
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
The Gladys Krieble
Delmas Foundation
The Howard Bayne Fund
JKW Foundation
The J.M. Kaplan Fund
King & Spalding LLP
Kirkland & Ellis Foundation
Seymour H. Lesser
Larry and Maria-Luisa Loeb
McDermott Will & Emery
Michael Tuch Foundation, Inc.
K. Ann McDonald
Caroline Niemczyk
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
Estelle Parsons
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP
Abby Pogrebin and David Shapiro
Ponce de Leon Foundation
Sarah I. Schieffelin Residuary Trust
Robert and Cynthia Schaffner
Kerri Scharlin and Peter Klosowicz
Susan Schultz and Thomas Faust
Select Equity Group, Inc.
Daryl and Joy Smith
Laura Speyer and Josef Goodman
The Speyer Family Foundation
Susan Stockel
Tarter Krinsky & Drogin LLP
Anne and William Tatlock
PRODUCERS CIRCLE—
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S SOCIETY
($5,000 and up)
Anonymous (2)
Axe-Houghton Foundation
Natalie Bernstein
The Bulova Stetson Fund
Walter Cain and Paulo Ribeiro
The Claire Friedlander
Family Foundation
Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc.
Aileen Dresner and Frank R. Drury
Jennifer and Steven Eisenstadt
Kirsten Feldman and Hugh Frater
Debra Fine and Martin I. Schneider
Jenny and Jeff Fleishhacker
Roberta Garza
Kathy and Steven Guttman
Michael Haggiag
Jennifer and Matt Harris
Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP
Anna and Peter Levin
Vincent Lima
Leah Lipskar
Litowitz Foundation, Inc.
May and Samuel Rudin Foundation Inc.
Ronay and Richard Menschel
Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss
Philip and Cheryl Milstein
New York City Council
New York City Tourism Foundation
Janet C. Olshansky
Anne Prost and Olivier Robert
Richenthal Foundation
Pamela Riess
Philip and Janet Rotner
Joseph Samulski
Mark and Marie Schwartz
Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles
Sidley Austin LLP
Michael Stranahan
Theatre Development Fund
Ayanna Thompson
The Venable Foundation
Margo and Anthony Viscusi
Earl D. Weiner
Josh and Jackie Weisberg
PRODUCERS CIRCLE—EXECUTIVE
($2,500 and up)
Anonymous (2)
Elizabeth Beller-Dee and Michael Dee
Nancy Blachman and David desJardins
Hilary Brown and Charles Read
Jane Cooney
Dennis M. Corrado
Cynthia Crossen and James Gleick
Christine Cumming
Katharine and Peter Darrow
DeLaCour Family Foundation
Jodie and Jonathan Donnellan
Sharon Dunn and Harvey Zirofsky
Suzan and Fred Ehrman
Judith and Alan Fishman
Steven Feinsilver
Foley Hoag LLP
Linda Genereux and Timur Galen
Monica Gerard-Sharp
Lauren Glant and Michael Gillespie
Debra Goldsmith Robb
Karoly and Henry Gutman
Thomas Healy and Fred P. Hochberg
Jane Hartley and Ralph Schlosstein
Sophia Hughes
Irving Harris Foundation
The Irwin S. Scherzer Foundation
Flora and Christoph Kimmich
Andrea Knutson
John Koerber
Sandy and Eric Krasnoff
Sonia and Arvind Krishna
Cathy and Christopher Lawrence
Taryn and Mark Leavitt
Justine and John Leguizamo
Patricia and Frank Lenti
Diane and William F. Lloyd
Lucille Lortel Foundation
Susan Martin and Alan Belzer
Marta Heflin Foundation
Bella L. Meyer
Alessandra and Alan Mnuchin
Barbara Forster Moore and Richard Wraxall Moore
Connie and Tom Newberry
Catherine Nyarady and Gabriel Riopel
Sarah Paley and Joseph Kerrey
Annie Paulsen and Albert Garner
Ellen Petrino
Ponce Bank
Proskauer Rose LLP
Rajika and Anupam Puri
Leslie and David Puth
The Tony Randall Theatrical Fund
Jill Rosenberg
Robert and Anna Marie Shapiro
Sandra and Steven Schoenbart
Jeremy T. Smith
Lisa and Mitch Solomon
Ellen Sontag-Miller and William C. Miller
Lauren and Jay Springer
Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund
Gayle and Jay Waxenberg
Joanne Witty and Eugene Keilin
PRODUCERS CIRCLE— ASSOCIATE
($1,000 and up)
Anonymous (4)
Actors’ Equity Foundation
Ann Ash
Jackie and Jacob Baskin
Elizabeth Bass
M.J. and James Berrien
Cece and Lee Black
Molly and Tom Boast
Mary Bockelmann Norris and Floyd Norris
Lani and Dave Bonifacic
Penny Brandt Jackson and Thomas Campbell Jackson
Christina and John Bransfield
Pamela Brier and Peter Aschkenasy
Deborah Buell and Charles Henry
Janel Callon
Joan and Robert Catell
Susan Cowie
Ian Dickson and Reg Holloway
Ev and Lee
Ryan Fanek
Pamela Givner
Virginia Gliedman
Joyce Gordon and Paul Lubetkin
The Grace R. and Alan D. Marcus Foundation
Anne and Paul Grand
Alba Greco-Garcia and Roger Garcia
Kathleen and Harvey Guion
Judy and Douglas Hamilton
David Harms
Grace Harvey
Vicki and Ronald Hauben
Laura and Robert Hoguet
Sally and Alfred Jones
Miriam Katowitz and Arthur Radin
Helen Kauder and Barry Nalebuff
Debra Kaye and Steven Horowitz
Nora Wren Kerr and John J. Kerr
Susan Kurz Snyder
Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins
Marion Leydier and Brooks Perlin
Dedee and Steve Lovell
Margaret Lundin
Rebecca and Stephen Madsen
Kathleen Maurer
Jeffrey and Wendy Maurer
Leslie and Jordan Mayer
Allison C. McCullough and Parker L. Krasney
Marie Nugent-Head and James Marlas
Mimi Oka and Jun Makihara
Marlene Marko and Loren Skeist
Lori and Lee Parks
Martin Payson
Margaret and Carl Pfeiffer
Carol and Michael Reimers
Susan and Peter Restler
David A.J. Richards
Susan and William Rifkin
Enid and Paul I. Rosenberg
Riva and Stephen Rosenfield
Joan H. Ross
Daryl and Steven Roth
Judith Ruiz
Dorothy Ryan and John Leitch
Avi Sharon and Megan
Hertzig Sharon
Stacy Schiff and Marc de la Bruyere
Cynthia and Thomas Sculco
Susan Sommer and Stephen A. Warnke
The Bernard and Anne Spitzer
Charitable Trust
Wendy and Tom Stephenson
Barbara Stimmel
Julie Taymor
Roger Tilles
Donna Zaccaro Ullman and Paul A. Ullman
Cynthia King Vance and Lee Vance
Fran and Barry Weissler
Elena and Louis Werner
Abby Westlake
Tappan Wilder
Debra Winger
Evan D. Yionoulis and Donald Holder
Carol Yorke and Gerard Conn
Nancy Young and Paul Ford
Audrey Zucker
IN HONOR OF
In honor of Lenny Bruce Lawrence Dial
In honor of Georgia Carney
Caroline Carney
In memory of Mildred Feinsilver
Steven Feinsilver
In honor of Brian Florczack
Aaron Donehue
In honor of Michael Kahn Maxine Isaacs
In honor of Audrey Meyer
Laurie Tisch
In honor of Ned Patricia McGuire
In honor of Ned Eisenberg Anonymous
In honor of Evelyn and Everett Ortner
Deirdre Lawrence and Clem Labine
In honor of Maggie Siff David Bickart
In honor of Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein
Natalie Bernstein
In honor of Kathleen Walsh
Gene Bernstein
The following companies have contributed through their Matching Gift Programs: If your employer has a matching gift program, please consider making a contribution to Theatre for a New Audience and making your gift go further by participating in your employer’s matching gift program. Bank of America
Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation
The Hearst Corporation
International Business Machines
Theatre for a New Audience’s productions and education programs are made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Theatre for a New Audience recognizes with gratitude the following donors to Theatre for a New Audience’s Capital Campaign to support ambitious programming, access to affordable tickets and financial resiliency.
Named funds within the Capital Campaign include the Henry Christensen III Artistic Opportunity Fund, the Audrey H. Meyer New Deal Fund and the Merle Debuskey Studio Fund . Other opportunities include the Completing Shakespeare’s Canon Fund, Capital Reserves funds and support for the design and construction of New Office and Studio Spaces
To learn more, or to make a gift to the Capital Campaign, please contact James Lynes at jlynes@tfana.org or by calling 646-553-3886.
$1,000,000 AND ABOVE
Mr.◊ and Mrs. Henry Christensen III
Ford Foundation
The Howard Gilman Foundation
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
The Thompson Family Foundation
$250,000-$999,999
Booth Ferris Foundation
Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine
Merle Debuskey◊
Irving Harris Foundation
The Stairway Fund, Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein
$100,000–$249,999
Alan Jones and Ashley Garrett
Carol Sutton Lewis and William M. Lewis, Jr.
Seymour H. Lesser
The Polonsky Foundation
Charlene Magen Weinstein◊
$50,000–$99,999
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Aileen and Frank Drury
Agnes Gund
The Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund
New York State Council on the Arts
Abby Pogrebin and David Shapiro
John and Regina Scully Foundation
Marcia T. Thompson◊
$20,000–$49,999
Peggy and Keith Anderson
Elaine and Norman Brodsky
Kathy and Steve Guttman
Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation
Cynthia and Robert Schaffner
Kerri Scharlin and Peter Klosowicz
Daryl and Joy Smith
Susan Stockel
Anne and William Tatlock
Earl D. Weiner
$10,000–$19,999
Diana Bergquist
Sally R. Brody
New York State Energy Research and Development Authority
Linda and Jay Lapin
Janet Wallach and Robert Menschel◊
Alessandra and Alan Mnuchin
Anne Prost and Robert Olivier
Allison and Neil Rubler
Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch
Michael Tuch Foundation
Jackie and Josh Weisberg
$5,000–$9,999
Alan Beller
Katharine and Peter Darrow
Bipin and Linda Doshi
Marcus Doshi
Downtown Brooklyn Partnership
Susan Schultz and Thomas Faust
Barbara G. Fleischman
Jane Garnett and David Booth
Penny Brandt Jackson and Thomas Jackson
Miriam Katowitz and Arthur Radin
Mary and Howard Kelberg
Kirsten and Peter Kern
Susan Litowitz
Ronay and Richard Menschel
Ann and Conrad Plimpton
Priham Trust/The Green Family
Alejandro Santo Domingo
Marie and Mark Schwartz
Cynthia and Thomas Sculco
Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss
◊deceased
A Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) established a Humanities endowment fund at Theatre for a New Audience to support in perpetuity the 360° Series: Viewfinders as well as the TFANA Council of Scholars and the free TFANA Talks series. Leading matching gifts to the NEH grant were provided by Joan and Robert Arnow, Norman and Elaine Brodsky, The Durst Organization, Perry and Marty Granoff, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, John J. Kerr & Nora Wren Kerr, Litowitz Foundation, Inc., Robert and Wendy MacDonald, Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Inc., Theodore C. Rogers, and from purchasers in the Theatre’s Seat for Shakespeare Campaign, 2013-2015.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Viewfinder or the Theatre’s Humanities programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.