Rob Hille, Jenna Panther, and Justin Yorio, Artistic Directors of Amios, on “Seven Deadly Shotz”

Amios presents Seven Deadly Shotz

As the producer of Go See a Show!, I’m going to take off my “objectivity” hat for this episode. I already do so in the interview, as you’ll hear, so why not go whole hog?

I’m happy to report that the “want to make theatre? then throw down and make some f*cking theatre” mentality is alive and well in this town. And Amios is at the front of that charge, in the best of ways.

Frankly, this episode is about what I thought downtown theatre was going to be when I arrived in New York. Amios is making theatre the way I want to make theatre (and often do make theatre, sometimes with them — but they just do it a lot more often), with the kind of people I love to make theatre with. Amios says, “we’re not going to wait for an opportunity—we’re going to make an opportunity.” And they do it as friends.

The greatest parts of it are, they consistently do it with a high level of quality, and always while having a heck of a lot of fun.

The company is kicking off their 5th season with the return of their monthly Shotz series (you may remember it from episode 13 of this very podcast). Shotz always works around a theme, and this month, it’s the 7 deadly sins; so naturally, the show on October 7 will be, Seven Deadly Shotz. Full disclosure: I’m directing the one on “greed.”

Listen in as Artistic Directors Rob Hille, Jenna Panther, and Justin Yorio discuss how you draw a crowd to your off-off-Broadway show (beer helps, they say — who’d have thought?), how to give your collaborators a sense of ownership, sin, and wanting to watch your artist friends “work out.”

“…people are like, ‘how do you guys do all this stuff?’…and the reason that we can do it is because of our badass team of folks…it is a collective, as opposed to a typical theatre company, and more, ‘everybody’s in the trenches together, making stuff happen.’ It’s more sustainable that way…”

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Rachel Dart & Jenna Panther, directors of “There’s a Light on Yonder Mountain”

Ever wanted to create a brand-new piece of theatre, from the ground up? This is a good episode of the podcast for you.

aMios and Horse Trade present "There's a Light on Yonder Mountain"aMios has always embraced new work — their Shotz series is responsible for creating six brand new plays every month (!), and their past “longer-form” work has all consisted of brand-new plays from artists in the aMios circle of collaborators. Check out a great interview about Shotz on Episode 13.

For their latest full-length, There’s a Light on Yonder Mountain, the company wanted to bring in the creative energies of many of the wonderful people they’ve worked with since their inception in 2009. So instead of asking just one playwright to write a script, they asked five (one acted as a “literary manager”). And naturally, instead of one director, they got two.

Which led me, as a director myself, to ask the first question of this interview: how?!?!?

Listen in as those directors, Rachel Dart & Jenna Panther, discuss not only how they worked together as a team, but a whole lot more, including creating an ensemble-driven devised piece, tension, desert-island people, and the only resource you can’t get more of: time.

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Kristin McCarthy Parker, director of “Bears”

Sans A Productions' "Bears" Most of us theatre nerds are familiar with The Bard’s famous stage direction of “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

Mark Rigney’s new play presented by Sans A Productions at 59E59 might be the first where all the exits are actually done by bears.

In the appropriately-titled Bears, three of the titular creatures — two accustomed to life in captivity, and a third just recently brought in from the wild — negotiate a post-human-apocalyptic world where there are no more meals brought by a zookeeper. When wild Susie Bear coaxes young Timmy Bear and the intellectual Growl Bear from their cage into the wild, relationships are tested as they all figure out what it really means to be a bear.

Director Kristin McCarthy Parker sat down for a chat on the mic to talk about this imaginative, striking play; listen in as she discusses the id vs. the superego, how to pick things up like a bear, and leaving behind a legacy after the apocalypse.

“We have this route, and that route, and I’m somewhere in between, and I think that’s an o.k. thing, but I don’t really know where I’m going to end up…which is great…”

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