Kickstarter

In August of last year, we started brainstorming for a new project going up in May of 2013. We started with three concrete goals: involve as many of our talented artists as possible, find new ways to collaborate and share an engaging piece of theatre with our audience. 

Amios works with a lot of great playwrights and we wanted to involve as many as we could. We’ve often asked writers to create individual pieces based on a common theme, as we do in our monthly show Shotz, but we wanted to play with our usual format. We wanted to do something more challenging, more epic! We wondered what would happen if we got a bunch of our playwrights together to work on a single script collaborating the same way directors and actors do. 

We reached out to company playwrights Stacy Davidowitz, Lindsay Joy Murphy, David H. Rosen & David L. Williams. We then brought on Kate MacCluggage as the literary manager to serve as the director of the writers to shape the piece as it was being written.

We are beyond thrilled about the play they’re creating, called There's a Light on Yonder Mountain. It’s inspired by mythologist Joseph Campbell’s work on the Hero’s Journey, which is a story you already know, even if you don’t know you know it. Basically, as Mr. Campbell summarizes it: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder... fabulous forces are there encountered... and a decisive victory is won... the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Sound familiar?

Commissioning a script by multiple playwrights led us to further break tradition and experiment with new ways to collaborate in our rehearsal room. So Rachel Dart & Jenna Panther will be co-directing the play. Five creators. Two Directors. Hero’s Journey. Epic. 

We’ve achieved our first two goals and we need your help to meet the third: sharing this engaging piece of theatre with our audience. We get free space to rehearse and perform through an Artist Residency with the Horse Trade Theatre Group; so all the money we raise goes to things like set, lights, costumes and to the artists making the work. 

Thanks for your time and consideration!! Follow our progress at amiosnyc.org and we’ll see you for the run of the show May 23rd-June 8th at Under St Marks.