selected portfolio

GAGE COUNTY NE

2021

Beatrice Community Players

Beatrice Nebraska

Cast

Written and Directed by Cecilia Rubino

Grant Bennett

Josh Erikson

Mason Gustafson

Ashley Hothan

Diane Kahnk

Heidi Krieger

Carla Loemker

Missy Marlatt

Walter J. McDowell III

Katy Morehouse

Paige Patton

Lisa Steiner

Marshall Tuttle

Elizabeth Veverka

Callan Williams

Michael Zavodny

GAGE COUNTY NE: DIRECTOR’S NOTE

“Why did this happen? Why did this happen here?”

These questions posed in the play you are about to watch are questions that communities across the country ask after a trauma or an act of senseless violence. GAGE COUNTY NE is a documentary theater piece that delves into the controversial case of Mrs. Helen Wilson's murder, those accused of the crime now known as ‘The Beatrice Six’ and the subsequent trials that have affected Gage County for more than three decades. It’s a Beatrice story which importantly is told by community members but it’s also a national story with the recent appeal to the Supreme Court of the wrongful conviction award and the additional taxes that Gage County property owners are currently paying.  

But why create a documentary theater piece about this complicated, painful story? For me, the medium of documentary theater can offer a space to take on confounding issues from multiple perspectives. Documentary Theater -- also called ‘Verbatim Theater’ or ‘Theater of Testimony’

-- are plays that are created from documentary sources which include trial transcripts, interviews, news articles, and other historic documents. This form of theater has an important legacy in the history of American theater from the ‘Living Newspapers’ performed during the Great Depression to seminal works such as The Laramie Project, Fires in the Mirror, and The Exonerated, which have played a role in raising awareness, informing, and spurring action about important issues.

We are all inundated by the news. We may read about an event on our phones or listen to a story on TV, but we rarely have the time to delve under a headline. In the theater, we collectively gather -- we shut the door, turn the lights out, and sit together for 90 minutes to hear stories told through many different voices. It has been a real privilege to collaborate with the staff at the Beatrice Community Players and with this wonderful cast of actors who have so generously offered their time and their considerable talents to the devising of GAGE COUNTY NE. And while the crime is not recreated in the performance, some of the stories told that are based on the trial transcripts are disturbing. And maybe none of us has answers to the questions that the piece wrestles with, but we have to keep asking them and, perhaps in the process re-evaluate our assumptions and instigate one another in unexpected ways. Thank you for taking the time to come and we hope that GAGE COUNTY NE will contribute to generative dialogues both in Beatrice and beyond.  

From the Fire

2011
Judson Memorial Church
New York, NY

PRODUCTION

Director & Writer: Cecilia Rubino
Producer: Bonnie Roche-Bronfman
Composer: Elizabeth Swados
Music Director: Kris Kukul
Poetry: Paula Finn
Choreography: Eric Jackson Bradley

Lives of Tiresias

2018
A Jefferson Market Playhouse Production
Jefferson Market Library
New York, NY

ABOUT

Created and written by David Richman and co-written and directed by Cecilia Rubino, Lives of Tiresias is a new theatre piece with music that juxtaposes Richman’s personal story--the story of an ageing blind theatre artist—with the complex and competing myths that swirl around Tiresias, the unimaginably old blind prophet of Thebes.  

Combining classical language with Brechtian technique, the play interrogates and exemplifies such questions as:  What does it mean to have sight?  Insight? Foresight?  Why are we desperate to know the future—and why are we even more desperate NOT to know the future?  Why do the blind (we are all in various ways blind) come into such fundamental conflict with themselves and with each other? For Jean Genet, the aged prophet Tiresias is the patron saint of actors, and for T.S. Eliot, he is “the most important personage” in The Waste Land. The play delves into what is enduring about Tiresias—a personage who figures in so many ancient and modern tales and enacts aspects of his story – from the double sex change, the voyeurism with Athena and with the serpents, and the various encounters with Theban kings that have become iconic in Greek and Roman tragedy.   

Twelfth Night

2017
A Lang College Theater Program at The New School Production
The Irondale Theater Center
New York, NY

CAST

Aliyah Hakin, Benjamin Bailey, Naomi Khanukayev, Jmar Reid, John Weichner, Erin Page, Robert Greifeld, Leo Schlaefereit, Jacob Knapp, Carlos Mesa, Andie Fortier, Gideon Lazarus, James Mosser, Amanda Harford, Saleem Koshy, Sabrina Wu, Ashton Garcia, Danajha Davis, Rebecca Rodriguez, Tia Toney, Mohamed El Batran.

THE LARAMIE PROJECT

Uncle Vanya

2017
A Jefferson Market Playhouse Production
Jefferson Market Library
New York, NY

CAST

Elliot Nesterman, Cassandra Hunter, Aliyah Hakim, Charlotte Harvey, Kevin Schwab, Wayne Willinger, Frank Collerius, Pauline Walsh, Trevor Davis-Darden, Danajha Davis

Eugene O’Neill and the Village

2018
A Village Trip Festival walk, talk, live performance
Washington Square Hotel
New York, NY

ABOUT

The winner of four Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize for Literature, Eugene O’Neill (1888 -1953) was the first genius of American theater. An autodidact and a fighter for social justice, he was part of a golden circle of Greenwich Village writers and radicals the impact of whose work is still felt today. Born in a hotel on Times Square, his actor father an alcoholic, his mother a morphine addict, he set out to reimagine his family history in a series of harrowing plays that show a disdain for what he saw as the cardboard cut-out conventions of Broadway. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is arguably his most autobiographical work.

O’Neill arrived in the Village in 1914, falling in with a crowd that included John Reed, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. (In Warren Beatty’s 1981 movie Reds. O’Neill was played by Jack Nicholson.) He spent much of his time in the Golden Swan, a seedy bar on the corner of West 4th Street and Sixth Avenue known to its largely disreputable clientele as the Hell Hole or the Bucket of Blood. The bar would provide the sad inspiration for Harry Hope’s Saloon in O’Neill’s 1939 play The Iceman Cometh. Dorothy Day was another regular. Reportedly, this communist-Catholic activist could drink O’Neill under the table. It was Reed and his girlfriend Louise Bryant who tempted O’Neill up to the Cape, where the Provincetown Players’ second season was just beginning. In a ramshackle theatre in a former coastguard station, O’Neill made his debut as a produced playwright with Bound East for Cardiff, a one-act play inspired by his years at sea. By the end of that 1916 summer, the 29 Players had decided to start a theater back in Greenwich Village. Reed –a journalist and author of Ten Days That Shook the World –wrote a manifesto: “Be it resolved, that it is the primary object of the Provincetown Players to encourage the writing of American plays of real artistic, literary, and dramatic –as opposed to Broadway –merit.” Premises at 139 MacDougal Street were leased for $50 a month and the season opened with O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff. Four years later, he won his first Pulitzer with Beyond the Horizon.

Eugene O'Neill and the Village begins with a 45-minute walk from the Washington Square Hotel –which O’Neill would have known as the Hotel Earle –to sites, including Provincetown Playhouse, that were integral to O'Neill and his time in the Village. Returning to the Hotel, Returning to the Hotel, Cecilia Rubino, Associate Professor of Theater at Lang College/The New School, directed scenes and monologues connected with Village locations from Ah Wilderness, The Iceman Cometh, Anna Christie and Long Day's Journey Into Night.

As You Like It

2013
A Lang College Theater Program at The New School Production
East 14th Street Y Theater
New York, NY

CAST

Shaunice Alexander, JR Atkins, Brittany Bartlet, Benjamin Beaton, Daniel Benhamu, Kelly Burdge, Lily Comeau, Trevor David-Darden, Annabella de Meo, Anna Drsedale, Ian Garcia, Nicoletta Hynes, Nora Kennedy, Anastasia Krechet, Anders Lee, Zachary Mullen, Will Niedmann, Colette Pahl, Professor Michael Pettinger, Matthew Prideaux, Zoe Rhulen, Emily Roberts, Mimi Rooney, Mark Spathas, Evan Sudarsky, Joel Uritsecu, Lewis Welt

Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde

2017
A Jefferson Market Playhouse Production
Jefferson Market Library
New York, NY

CAST

Kevin Schwab, Trevor Davis-Darden, Elliot Nesterman, Katherine O'Sullivan, Chris Luongo, Esteban Linares, Adrienne Yu, James Mosser, John Weicher, Nora Kennedy, Katherine Buckley

Tar sands songbook

2018
Presented by the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School
in conjunction with the university-wide curriculum disruption: Disrupt Climate Injustice 
John L. Tishman Auditorium
New York, NY

ABOUT

An illuminating work of documentary theater, the Tar Sands Songbook asks us to reconsider our unseen relationships with oil. Creator Tanya Kalmanovitch knows these relationships all too well. Born in Fort McMurray, Canada, near the site of the Athabasca Oil Sands, the world’s largest bitumen reservoir, she made her decision to become a musician as a teenager because “it had nothing to do with oil.” Fort McMurray has since become a flashpoint of international clashes over energy, the environment, and the economy. Written in collaboration with director Cecilia Rubino, Kalmanovitch's polyphonic piece weaves together a chorus of actors' voices with an original, improvised score. The words of indigenous activists, engineers, heavy equipment operators, elders, oil patch workers, scientists, and those of her own family fuel discussions of our past and the powerful forces that shape our future.

MONSTER(s)

2014
A Lang College Theater Program at The New School Production
John L. Tishman Auditorium at The New School
New York, NY

Fefu and Her Friends

2012
A Lang College Theater Program at The New School Production
The New School for Drama Theater
New York, NY

CAST & CREW

Performers: Bree Malkuch, Charlotte Peters, Frankie Wagner, Lillie Johnson, Cole Thomas, Sara Weber, Tess Harrison, Vanessa Rose

Director: Cecilia Rubino
Writer: Maria Irene Fornes
Stage Manager: Ally Tufenkjian
Lighting Design: Nick Hung
Set Design: Jennifer Stimple

16 Bars: Youth (Off)ending Justice

2016
The New School Auditorium in Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall
New York, NY

CAST

Dahnaishia (Latune) Finch-Mellowes, Kevin Williams, Rashaun Thomas, Ivelis Palou, Alima Seyid, Traekwon Isaac

ABOUT

In Spring 2016: 6 exalt students traveled to Albany to speak to State Legislators about Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility in New York State which remained one of the last two states in the US to charge 16-18 as adults in the criminal justice system. Justine Gonzalez: exalt Internship Development and Outreach Manager and Kadeem Gibbs: of The Children’s Defense Fund, led students and in preparation, provided historical context on youth justice policies in New York. They were joined by Louisa Strothman, a New School student enrolled in a course taught by exalt Senior Teacher Brian Lewis and New School professor Cecilia Rubino.

Upon returning from Albany, Louisa Strothman conceived of fusing her exposure to the documentary theater techniques being learned in the course with the inspirational power of the stories and experiences of exalt’s young people. This would ultimately lead to the creation of 16 Bars. Created in two months in the summer of 2016, 16 Bars is a gripping and thought provoking documentary theater project – the first of its kind, produced by exalt youth. 16 Bars: Youth (Off)ending Justice features music, story-telling, visual imagery and other acoustic expressions conceived by exalt alumni; all focused on fostering awareness about Raising the Age of criminal responsibility in New York State.

The piece was directed by Brian Lewis and Cecilia Rubino. Following the performance at The New School, the Hon. Daniel J. O'Donnell of The New York State Assembly, Sonja Okun, Founder of exalt and Vincent Warren, Executive Director of Center for Constitutional Rights responded to key themes from the script and discussed with the public ways to push for a more equitable vision of youth justice in New York.

Odets

2016
Art Slope Festival at Berkeley Carroll Theater
Brooklyn, NY

The Tempest

2009
A Lang College Theater Program at The New School Production
Abrons Art Center Harry du Jour Playhouse
New York, NY

mark twain: adventures in american humor

2010
The Morgan Library
New York, NY

Women’s Legacy ProjecT

Oct 2020

The New School

New York, NY

Featuring 

Thelma Armstrong, Executive Assistant, The New School Elizabeth Coleman, Bennington College, President Emerita Julia Foulkes, Professor of History, School of Public Engagement  Julia Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott Biographer  Eva Haller, Alumna, The New School  Carin Kuoni, Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics  Mark Larrimore, Associate Professor of Religion, Eugene Lang College  Arien Mack, Alfred J. and Monette C. Marrow Professor of Psychology, NSSR Michelle Materre, Director of the Media Management Program, Associate Professor of Media Studies and Film  Tamara Oyola Santiago, Senior Educator & Mentor, Institute for Transformative Mentoring at The New School TracyAnn Williams, Director of Academic Affairs and Lecturer of Literature, Bachelor's Program for Adults and Transfer Students, SPE

Researchers Hannah Ashkinaze, NYU Sarvenaz Elmi, SPE Elena Gleed, NSSR Tara Mastrelli, NSSR  Joel de Lara, NSSR 

Film Interviews

Directed by Cecilia Rubino 

Filmed and edited by Will Lucas and Anomie Williams

Original Composition 

Stefania de Kenessey, Women’s Legacy March & incidental music

Production 

Ari Grossman

Mark Fitzpatrick, Director of Event Technology, The New School 

Performers

Nya Bernier Jeremiah Bryant Bettina Lobo Diaz    Crystal Ellington Judith Elster Tyler Exum   Angel Harrison                    Jasmine Holland                              Kimberly Lara   Paloma Mettler Xavier McKnight    Teresa Motherway   Nam Pham      Jennifer Roberts      Celeste Sena