HARP

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Video

Teaser : You Are Dead. You Are Here.

Artist Bio

Originally from Australia, Christine Evans is an internationally produced and awarded playwright now based in the U.S. Her productions include multi-award winning Trojan Barbie (American Repertory Theatre, 2009; Playbox Theatre, U.K. 2011); Weightless and All Souls’ Day (Perishable Theatre); Mothergun (Perishable Theatre; Emergency Theatre Project) Slow Falling Bird (Crowded Fire, San Francisco; Metro Arts, Brisbane) and My Vicious Angel (Belvoir St. Theatre; Adelaide International Festival, Australia). Further readings and workshop productions include the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Cutting Ball Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theatre, Synchronicity Theatre, the Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, Boston Playwrights Theatre, DeckChair Theatre, the Process Series at U.N.C. Chapel Hill, Georgetown University, Resonance Ensemble, the hotINK International Festival of Plays, the Women’s Project, Voice and Vision and the Australian National Playwrights’ Conference.

Evans’ honors include a Rockefeller Center Bellagio Residency Award, an Australian Fulbright Award, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (R.I.S.C.A.) Playwriting Fellowship, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, the 2007 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award and the “Plays for the 21st Century Award”. Christine holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Brown and teaches playwriting at Harvard. Her plays are published by Theatre Forum, Smith & Kraus and Samuel French, with a forthcoming anthology (War Plays) from NoPassport Press.

Evans has also played saxophone in jazz and Balkan fusion bands and composed and directed music for her own plays (My Vicious Angel; Company of Sharks; Slow Falling Bird) and many others (Emma; Appearing in Pieces; How I Learned to Drive) with Australian theatres and companies such as Belvoir St. Theatre, State Theatre of South Australia, the Adelaide International Festival of the Arts, The Party Line, Barking Gecko and DeckChair Theatre.


Joseph Megel directs and develops new works, for theatre, film and video. He is Artist-in Residence at U.N.C. (Chapel Hill) in Performance Studies where he runs the “Process Series: New Works in Development”. He served for six years as Artistic Director of Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey and continues to serve as Co-Executive Producer of Harland’s Creek Productions.

Megel directed his multi-award winning production of Guillermo Reyes’s Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown in its Off-Broadway production at the 47th Street Theatre (Outer Critics Circle Award), Los Angeles (Ovation Award Winner) and elsewhere. He directed Jennifer Maisel’s award-winning The Last Seder in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Further directing credits include David Hare’s adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage (The Justice Theatre) Jason Robert Brown’s Parade, Ari Roth’s Peter and the Wolf (Jewish Theatre of the South) Edward Albee’s The Goat, Russell Lee’s Nixon’s Nixon and The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (all at Manbites Dog Theater, Durham); Men on the Verge II- The Self Esteem Files by Guillermo Reyes (Borderlands Theatre, Tucson;Teatro Bravo, Phoenix); the North American premiere of Naomi Ragon’s Women’s Minyan (Theater Or, Durham); the Off-Broadway production of Free Market (TheWorking Theatre); Voodoo Dreams for the Institute of the Performing Arts (Most Innovative Production - Arizona Republic); the New York premiere of Jim Grimsley’s The Lizard of Tarsus; an Off-Off Broadway revival of Athol Fugard’s The Blood Knot (78th Street Lab); Dolores Whiskeyman’s Radium Girls (Star Ledger 1999-2000 Best Play List, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey) and Guillermo Reyes’s The Seductions of Johnny Diego at Arizona State University (Best Production Zoni Award). His direction in North Carolina has garnered multiple year end “best of theatre” lists in the News & Observer, The Independent, and Triangle Theatre Review.

In Los Angeles Mr. Megel was artistic director of Theatre of N.O.T.E. for 15 years and co-founder and artistic director of A Renegade Theatre Ensemble and Words Across Cultures, where he directed over forty productions. He received several Drama-Logue Awards, two NAACP Theatre Awards nominations, an Ovation award nomination and a special commendation from Mayor Bradley. He holds an M.F.A. degree from U.S.C., an M.A. from the University of Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music and a B.S. in Speech from Northwestern University.


Jared Mezzocchi is an interactive media designer, software programmer and theater director. He received his MFA at Brooklyn College for Performance and Interactive Media Arts, where he now also lectures. He teaches at NYU, in the Playwrights Horizons studio, on the theory of media in performance NY. He has worked as Director of Visuals at Santos Party House, a concert venue and nightclub in lower Manhattan. Jared tours with Caden Manson’s Big Art Group as their Video Programs Designer and technician, and also has programmed for Rob Roth’s production of Screen Test. In 2011 he designed interactive media for The Glass Menagerie Project directed by Derek Goldman, a large-scale adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ work that premiered at the Davis Center for the Performing Arts (Georgetown University) in co-production with Arena Stage, D.C. 

Jared directed his original multimedia adaptations of Don Quixote and Dick Tracy at Andy’s Summer Playhouse (2009 and 2010) an experimental theater for children in Wilton, NH. Throughout the year, he also aids various forms of entertainment, such as runways during Fashion Week, concerts in different music halls, installations in warehouses and galleries, and holding workshops in classrooms. Using software such as Max MSP/JITTER, Isadora, and Modul8, Jared designs video to be interactive with the space and the live performers. Jared is most interested in using this cutting edge software to return the multimedia theater back to the art of storytelling. 

Artist Statement

Christine Evans says “I’m excited to work on a piece where the technology is absolutely part of the story we’re telling, given the increasing use of animation and video-game technology in war. The tension between this cutting-edge media, and the bodily, human cost of war, creates a powerful space for story-telling. In a digital world that erases the body from the screen, it seems urgent to find ways of bearing witness to war’s shock waves and their aftermath.

“The opportunity to work so intimately in building the work with Joseph and Christine is not only a privilege, but also a necessity,” says Jared Mezzocchi. “So many times multimedia environments gain momentum in tech rehearsals, but here – we have an opportunity to discover how both story can inspire technology and how technology can illuminate storytelling.”

According to Joseph Megel, “Our residency at HERE will allow us to work together with actors in the room, mapping technology, bodies and story-telling in an organic way to create 21st century theatre about a subject—war damage—that affects so many. I am excited by our new collaboration with the Institute for Creative Technology at USC, and by our conversations with veterans and those affected by war. I believe You Are Dead. You Are Here. will resonate powerfully with audiences as a needed and missing part of a national conversation on the costs of our wars.”
 

Connect

• Contact Christine
• Contact Jared
• Contact Joseph

• Christine's website
• Jared's website