Walls and Bridges

THEATER COLLECTIVE

USA

Biography

The National Theater of the United States of America was created in 2000 with the inaugural production Garvey and Superpant$:Episode #23, for which a lavish, miniature 1930's era vaudeville theater was constructed in the basement of a dilapidated deli in Times Square. The piece was a popular and critical success, and firmly established the company on the New York theater scene. In 2001, as chashama artists-in-residence, the NTUSA created Episode #17 of our Fathers, Garvey & Superpant$: Placebo Sunrise, converting a vacant storefront on 42nd St. into a 1950’s era Havana-style nightclub. An audience of forty followed the amnesiac heroes from Episode #23 on a paranoiac holiday, sipping custom ‘placebo’ cocktails in vertical tiers of seating. The show ran for three and a half months to sold-out houses and was hailed as one the years 10 best by Time Out New York. In 2002 The NTUSA was awarded Arts International’s DNA project Grant and remounted Episode #23 at the 2002 ESB-Dublin Fringe Festival. (“...blows most of what we see these days on bourgeois stages out of the water” The Guardian.) The NTUSA also offered a one night only special presentation of Jack Russell’s Superconfidence Seminar™! at Galapagos in Brooklyn. In 2003, in residence at Nest Arts in DUMBO, Brooklyn, the NTUSA created What’s That On My HEAD!?! Conceived as a theme park ride, the show’s audience rode a mobile platform pushed and pulled through the space, visiting sets on all sides. HEAD!?! explored multiple visions of the American Dream, alternate versions of accepted history and the culture's dual tendencies towards complacency and revolt. The show was extended twice and ran for ten weeks (January to March 2004). In May, 2007, the NTUSA received the second Annual Spalding Gray Award honoring innovative writing and performance, a co-commission for a new work entitled The Chautauqua Lectures. The piece was inspired by the Lecture series of the same name which traveled the country from 1874 to the 1930’s and was presented at PS122, The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, UCLA Live and other venues in 2008/2009.