NEW YORK CITY: The New Ohio Theatre will present its final Ice Factory Festival June 28 through Aug. 12. The festival will employ a hybrid model, including live in-person performances as well as livestreams and on-demand offerings. Ice Factory 2023 features seven new works over seven weeks, culminating in artistic director Robert Lyons’s Ultra Left Violence as the final show.
Live in-person performances are Wed.-Sat. at 7 p.m. All Thursday night performances are livestreamed at 7 p.m. ET, then made available on demand through the end of the festival. Tickets are $20 and $18 (students and seniors). You can purchase livestream and on-demand tickets here and in-person tickets here.
Performances of Deadclass, Ohio will run June 28-July 1. Devised by The Goat Exchange and produced by Victoria Ungvarsky and Talia Escobedo, with original text by Eliya Smith, live music by Sasha Yakub, and direction by Mitchell Polonsky and Chloe Claudel, it is inspired by Tadeusz Kantor’s masterpiece Dead Class, set in a Jewish cemetery during a séance.
Performances of Zebra 2.0 will take place July 5-8. Zebra 2.0, written by Saviana Stanescu and directed by Jeremy Goren, with contributions from data scientist Dr. Niki Athanasiadou, is co-produced by AnomalousCo and Wistaria Project. Billed as a sci-fi rom-com, Zebra 2.0 engages questions of artificial intelligence, humanity, immigration, belonging, simulation, and consciousness through the uncanny friendship of an undocumented woman and an AI who counts zebras.
Next is On The Cranial Nerves of Barbarians II: A Carp Sanctuary, July 12-15. Created by PPL and conceived and co-directed by Esther Neff, Noah Ortega, and 3dwardsharp, with Victoria Bray, Irina Virina, Thea Little, Jessica Bathurst, and Mia Destiny the show explores an AI, programmed with medical texts and expressionist plays, as it wades into a polluted pond roiling with invasive carp.
Performances of here i fall up run July 19-22. Written and composed by Beth Golison, directed by Annabel Heacock and Maiya Pascouche, and music directed and orchestrated by Kyle Brenn, here i fall up is a new ghost story/folk musical about a girl at odds with the ground beneath her feet, navigating her relationships with her sisters, her lover, and a ghost.
Next is gerstl took the easy way out, July 26-29. Written by Lydia Blaisdell, directed by Ashley Olive Teague, and developed and produced with Notch Theatre Company, the play is set in Vienna in 1908, where both Mathilde’s hubby and lover are threatening to hang themselves again.
Performances of How I Disappeared will be Aug. 2-5. Devisers/playwrights/performers/puppeteers include Tianding He, Jiaoyang Li, Yuexing Sun, and Qingan Zhang. The piece is a multimedia devised object performance project that explores the poetic and personal urban life experiences of six female Asian immigrant artists in NYC with original live music, AR puppetry, and interactive installations.
The festival concludes with Lyons’s Ultra Left Violence, Aug. 9-12, with text by Lyons and direction by Daniel Irizarry. A work-in-progress described as an “anti-capitalist dialogue/lecture/manifesto run amok,” with live music, Ultra Left Violence will be further developed in residencies at Mercury Store and NACL in fall 2023.
As previously announced, New Ohio Theatre will conclude operations after 30 years at the end of the current season on Aug. 31.
