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Mondays, pre-reception 7:30 pm/readings 8 pm
October 18, 2010 & January 31, 2011
Additional readings for December 6, 2010 & May 23, 2011 TBA
FREE
Scandinavian American Theater Company (SATC), the first-ever Scandinavian-American theater company in New York, was founded in 2009 by a group of New York-based Scandinavian theater professionals with the wish to introduce a new generation of Scandinavian playwrights to an American audience. SATC’s mission is to present high-quality, cutting-edge productions of contemporary Scandinavian plays and fresh interpretations of the Scandinavian classics, as well as to foster the Scandinavian-American performing arts community in New York.
In their Contemporary Scandinavian Reading Series, SATC presents five plays annually representing Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark (including Greenland and the Faroe Islands).
Co-presented by the Consulate General of Denmark, New York, the Consulate General of Sweden in New York, and Scandinavia House.
For Sheer Love of Me/Rakkaudesta minuun
October 18
Written by Anna Krogerus (Finland, 2005) & directed by Sebastian Nyman Agdur (Sweden). The Northcliff family is slowly falling apart in their large apartment in a wealthy neighborhood. Tina, an interior decorator, and Edward, a TV psychologist, are growing apart, while their ten year-old daughter, Sylvia (named after Sylvia Plath), becomes increasingly lonely and isolated. All these suppressed feelings surface with the arrival of a new neighbor, Sally Peak. The entire family piles their hopes and desperation onto Sally, which leads to an inevitable collision. For Sheer Love of Me is a melancholy, perceptive, compassionate and subtly humorous examination of alienation within a family.
About the playwright:
Anna Krogerus (b. 1974, Kuopio, Finland) got her breakthrough as a playwright in 2006 with For Sheer Love of Me/Rakkaudesta minuun, first performed at the Finnish National Theatre. Both a critical and popular success, it also received the Finnish Critics’ Association Award for Best Play. Krogerus studied literature at the University of Tampere and dramaturgy at the Theatre Academy of Finland (1996-2002). Since 2005, she has worked as resident writer and dramaturge at the Kajaani Municipal Theatre in Finland. Krogerus writes sensitive and complex plays, full of deeply introspective characters, balancing between anxiety and joy.
Pinocchio’s Ashes/Pinocchios aske*
*Guest-starring Jokum Rohde
January 31, 2011
Written by Jokum Rohde (Denmark, 2005) & directed by Henning Hegland (Norway). A prohibition on art and culture has been imposed in the city of Kongstad. Judge Wolff is to implement it, but in the decadent and paranoid universe Rohde has created, he and the other characters become human wrecks. Inspired by the American courtroom genre, the award-winning Pinocchio's Ashes is an expressionistic drama about the role of art in our times and the demonic in human nature. It is a dynamic, gripping story filled with melancholy, poetry and dark humor.
About the playwright:
Considered one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary playwrights, Jokum Rohde (b. 1970, Denmark) has been a resident playwright at The Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen since 2008. He got his breakthrough in 1998 with the three-character theater-noir drama Nero. A prolific writer, he followed with nine plays that were produced throughout Denmark and in 2005, he wrote Pinocchio's Ashes for which he was awarded the prestigious Reumert award in the category Playwright of the Year. Pinocchio's Ashes has subsequently been produced at Dramaten, the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as in Norway, Lithuania and Italy.
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