En Garde Arts, in association with Vineyard Theatre, Announces Cast & Team for THE WIND AND THE RAIN: A STORY AB OUT SUNNY’S BAR, Sept 28 - Oct 27
Posted by: Official_Press_Release 07:30 pm EDT 09/05/24

EN GARDE ARTS, IN ASSOCIATION WITH VINEYARD THEATRE,

ANNOUNCES CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM FOR
THE WIND AND THE RAIN: A STORY ABOUT SUNNY'S BAR,

WRITTEN BY SARAH GANCHER

DIRECTED BY JARED MEZZOCCHI,

SEPTEMBER 28 - OCTOBER 27, 2024


Cast Includes Jennifer Regan, Pete Simpson, Paco Tolson, Jen Tullock, and Musician Pete Lanctot


Site-Specific, Multimedia Theatrical Experience at Waterfront Museum Celebrates Stories & People of Red Hook's Beloved 100-Year Old Bar

En Garde Arts, in association with Vineyard Theatre, is pleased to announce details for the world premiere of The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny's Bar, a site-specific, multimedia theatrical experience created by Obie Award winners, playwright Sarah Gancher and director Jared Mezzocchi. Commissioned by Vineyard Theatre and En Garde Arts, The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny's Bar carries forward En Garde Arts long history of site-specific work using the city as our stage". It will run September 28 – October 27, 2024, at The Waterfront Museum (290 Conover Street, Brooklyn) with an opening set for Monday, October 7, 2024. Tickets are now on sale at www.engardearts.org .


At the end of Conover Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on the waterfront, there is a bar called Sunny's. For over 100 years, it's been run by one family, through booms and busts, prohibition and pandemics, blight and gentrification. It's been home to dreamers and immigrants, artists, bootleggers, longshoremen, union bosses, corrupt police, numbers runners, bluegrass musicians, and hipsters. And when Hurricane Sandy hit, it was almost lost forever. But in that moment of incomprehensible damage and loss, one woman persevered. Tone Johansen fought to save Sunny's - for all of us.


The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny's Bar rock-skips across the decades, reaching into the deep past and leaping into the future. Beginning at The Waterfront Museum and ending at Sunny's Bar, it invites audiences inside the lives of the real people who became the fabric of this community. The Wind and the Rain uses immersive design technology, to tell a quintessential New York Story about how the currents of time and nature shaped our lives.


The cast for The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny's Bar includes Jennifer Regan ( Born Yesterday), Obie winner Pete Simpson ( Is This A Room), Lortel nominee Paco Tolson ( Vietgone, Knight of the Burning Pestle), Jen Tullock (Apple TV's Severance, HBO's Perry Mason), and musician Pete Lanctot.


The creative team includes Marcelo Martínez Garcia (scenic design), Mika Eubanks (costume design), Amith Chandrashaker (lighting design), Jane Shaw (sound design), Paul Deziel (projection/ video design), and Olivia Fletcher (production stage manager).


En Garde Arts's Executive Artistic Director Anne Hamburger commented, "The Wind and the Rain is a dream project of mine as it harkens back in form to the early site-specific work on which En Garde Arts built its reputation. With its historic charm, Red Hook is an ideal neighborhood in which to mount this site-specific piece envisioned by two exceptionally creative minds. Sarah Gancher is not only an acclaimed playwright, but also a gifted fiddle player and longtime Sunny's regular, while Jared is a talented multi-hyphenate artist and consummate storyteller. En Garde Arts is proud to shine a light on Sunny's intrepid owner, Tone Johansen. Theatrical productions with brave and exceptional women at their center are all too rare."


Twenty-two performances of The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny's Bar will take place September 28 – October, 27, 2024, at The Waterfront Museum, located at 290 Conover St in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Critics are welcome as of Friday, October 4, for a press opening on Monday, October 7, 2024. Performances take place Wednesday–Friday at 8pm, Saturday and Sunday at 6pm with weekend performances moving to 5pm beginning on October 19. Tickets, starting at $20, are now on sale at www.engardearts.org .


Please visit www.engardearts.org for more information.

About the Creative Team

Sarah Gancher (playwright) is an Obie Award-winning playwright whose work has been seen at London's National Theatre, Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, The Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, The Vineyard Theatre, Steppenwolf, Berkeley Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, Hartford Stage, RoundHouse (DC), Seattle Rep, and Ars Nova, among others. Recent work includes Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy (Vineyard Theatre & Geva Theatre, in association with Dori Berinstein, dir. Darko Tresnjak; online production for Theaterworks Hartford/Theatre Squared/The Civilians, dir. Jared Mezzocchi & Elizabeth Williamson; NY Times Top 10 Theater of 2020.) She was the book writer for two musicals with The Bengsons, Anne Kauffman, and Sonya Tayeh, Hundred Days and The Lucky Ones, and the collaborating playwright for The TEAM's Mission Drift, composed by Heather Christian and directed by Rachel Chavkin. Honors include the Richard Rodgers Award, the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Award, New York Stage and Film Founders' Award, The Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, the James Stevenson Prize for Comedy, several Lortel, Drama Desk, and Drama League nominations, and the AR Gurney Prize. An alumna of Ars Nova Play Group, WP Lab, P73 and The Playwrights' Realm, she is a current resident at New Dramatists. She can often be found playing bluegrass fiddle at Sunny's on Saturday nights.

Jared Mezzocchi (director) is a two-time Obie Award-winning theater artist, working as a director, multimedia designer, playwright, and actor. Based out of New York, Mezzocchi's work has appeared at notable theaters nationwide, including the Kennedy Center, the Geffen Playhouse, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth (company member), and many more. In 2016, he received the Lucille Lortel and Henry Hewes Award for his work in Qui Nguyen's Vietgone at the Manhattan Theatre club. In 2020, the New York Times spotlighted his multimedia innovations alongside the pandemic work of four other theater artists, including Andrew Lloyd Webber and Paula Vogel. His work on Sarah Gancher's digital production of Russian Troll Farm (co-director & multimedia designer) was also celebrated as a New York Times critic pick, and praised for being one of the first digitally native successes for virtual theater. In 2023, this digital production of Russian Troll Farm won Mezzocchi his second Obie. Most recently, Mezzocchi directed Sandra at TheaterWorks Hartford and was accepted, as a writer/performer, into the 2024 Colorado New Play Festival for his work 73 Seconds directed by Aya Ogawa and commissioned by En Garde Arts. Mezzocchi is a two-time Macdowell Artist Fellow, a 2012 Princess Grace Award winner, and is an Associate Professor at The University of Maryland, where he teaches in the MFA Design program for the projection and multimedia track, a curriculum he created in 2012. Over the pandemic, Mezzocchi founded Virtual Design Collective (VIDCO), which has aided in the development of over 50 new digital works over the last 18 months. This year, he is finishing his book, A Multimedia Designer's Method to Theatrical Storytelling, which will be published through Routledge. Mezzocchi has a BA in theater and film from Fairfield University, and an MFA in performance and interactive media arts from Brooklyn College.


About the Cast

Jennifer Regan (actor) - BROADWAY/WEST END: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Born Yesterday, The Lady from Dubuque. OFF-BROADWAY: Straight Line Crazy (The Shed), How I Learned to Drive (2nd Stage), Buffalo Gal (Primary Stages), Pig Farm (Roundabout). REGIONAL: The Da Vinci Code (Ogunquit), Sweat (Huntington), Girls (Yale Rep), Octoroon and Troublemaker (Berkeley Rep), Twelfth Night (Hartford Stage), Lost In Yonkers, Resurrection Blues, Trojan Women (Old Globe) TELEVISION/FILM: FBI: Most Wanted (CBS), Law & Order: SVU (NBC), Neon Joe: Werewolf Hunter, The Heart She Holler (Adult Swim), The Good Nurse (Netflix) independent films The Humbling (with Al Pacino and Greta Gerwig) My Dead Boyfriend, and The Normals.

Pete Simpson (actor); Is This A Room (Broadway); Infinite Life (Atlantic Theater-NYC/Nat'l Theatre-London); Blue Man Group (NYC/ International); Measure for Measure (ERS/The Public); Straight White Men (Young Jean Lee/The Public); The Select: The Sun Also Rises (ERS/NY Theatre Workshop); North Atlantic (Wooster Group); California (Clubbed Thumb); Lear (YJLTC/Soho Rep). Select TV: Gotham ; Law & Order Film: Marriage Story; Lincoln in the Bardo Awards: 2017 Obie Award; ND/Charles Bowden Award.

Paco Tolson (actor) is a graduate of Brown University and a company member of The Actors Center, EST, and the critically acclaimed Fiasco Theater. He's worked extensively Off-Broadway, earning two Lortel Award nominations for his work with Manhattan Theater Club (Vietgone , 2017) and Fiasco (Knight of the Burning Pestle, 2024). Regional: OSF, South Coast Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, and Actors Theater. Select TV: Prodigal Son, Law and Order: Organized Crime, Search Party, and Billions.

Jen Tullock (actor) is an actor and writer best known for her roles as Devon in Apple TV's Emmy nominated series Severance and Anita St. Pierre in HBO's Perry Mason. In 2019 she co-wrote and starred in the Sundance dramedy Before You Know It alongside Alec Baldwin, Mandy Patinkin, and Judith Light. Selected TV/Film: The L Word, Bless This Mess, Casual, Roadies, Apple's Spirited, Netflix's 6 Balloons, and Funny or Die's The Coop, which she co-wrote. Theater: 59E59 St., Joe's Pub, NY Stage & Film, and Playwrights Horizons, where she recently developed her one woman play Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God in their New Works Lab. Former Sundance Screenwriting Fellow and 2021 SAG Award nominee.

Pete Lanctot (musician) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, and teaching artist. He has worked with John Cale, Yoshiko Chuma, Durand Jones and the Indications, Aaron Frazer, Iris Dement, Tony Conrad, Katie Von Schleicher, Eugene Onegin (Orchard Project, TheaterSquared), Hearthbound Podcast, Hyperballad Studios, Lady Lamb, and Holly Miranda and has appeared on NPR's Tiny Desk, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Last Call with Carson Daly, and Live at KEXP.


About En Garde Arts

Founded by Executive Artistic Director Anne Hamburger in 1985, En Garde Arts is the award-winning pioneer of New York City's site-specific theatre movement. En Garde has a rich, impactful history of using the city as our stage to create, produce and present bold theatrical experiences that reach across artistic, physical and social boundaries. It has a significant legacy of producing ground breaking productions by Anne Bogart, Chuck Mee, Tina Landau, Reza Abdoh, Jonathan Larson andMac Wellman, among others It produces new work at the intersection of theatre and social change to spark conversations that explore new perspectives, and build an inclusive community. Two developmental programs: Uncommon Voices, and playdate serve dozens of artists each year with bespoke support for artistic teams developing new work.

When theatres were closed due to Covid-19, EGA produced A Dozen Dreams. It was a multimedia immersive installation that brought to life the dreams of 12 playwrights, including Lucy Thurber, Ren Dara-Santigo, Liza Jesse Peterson and Emily Mann, among others. Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes), a music-theatre production produced in 2020 and created by an all Latinx team: Andrea Thome (playwright), Sinuhé Padilla (music), José Zayas (director). It premiered at La MaMa, toured to Penn State, UMD, and was presented by the La Jolla Playhouse. In 2021 EGA launched a partnership with the Downtown Alliance BID, for the creation of Downtown Live, a festival of 36 outdoor performances, followed by Downtown Stories, composed of three theatrical pieces that rediscovered Lower Manhattan and its rich and complicated history. In 2023, EGA produced Helen. at La Mama, a new adaptation by Caitlin George of the SuperGeographics. En Garde is the recipient of six Obies, an Outer Critics' Circle award and a Drama Desk award. www.engardearts.org

About Vineyard Theatre

Vineyard Theatre (Sarah Stern and Douglas Aibel, Artistic Directors), located in New York City's Union Square, is one of America's preeminent homes for the creation of new plays and musicals, dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what theatre can be and do. For 41 years, The Vineyard has nurtured a community of fearless theatre-makers whose work has expanded the form, the field, and the larger culture. Notable premieres include Lucas Hnath's Dana H.; Tina Satter's Is This A Room (now HBO's Reality ); Paula Vogel's Indecent ; Nicky Silver's The Lyons; Kander, Ebb and Thompson's The Scottsboro Boys; Bell and Bowen's [title of show]; and Avenue Q by Marx, Lopez and Whitty (Tony Award, Best Musical), all of which transferred to Broadway. Four additional Vineyard shows have been revived in their first Broadway productions: Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive (Pulitzer Prize) ; Lanie Robertson's Lady Day At Emerson's Bar and Grill; Becky Mode's Fully Committed; and Edward Albee's Three Tall Women (Pulitzer Prize). Recently, David Cale's Harry Clarke transferred to London's West End and Jeremy O. Harris' "Daddy" received its London premiere at the Almeida; Ngozi Anyanwu's Good Grief was recorded by Audible; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Gloria was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and transferred to Chicago's Goodman Theatre; Colman Domingo's Dot is being adapted into an AMC series. Our 2023 world-premiere production of John J. Caswell's Scene Partners, starring Dianne Wiest, was live-streamed around the world. The Vineyard is proud to be the recipient of special Drama Desk, Obie, and Lucille Lortel Awards for artistic excellence and support of artists. www.vineyardtheatre.org


About Waterfront Museum

The Waterfront Museum is housed aboard the 1914 Lehigh Valley No. 79 listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the last remaining wooden railroad barge afloat from "The Lighterage Era" (1860-1984). Its mission is to provide free and low-cost opportunities for education, exhibition, and the performance arts. Prior to today's "Age of Containerization" (1956-present), Barge 79 transported up to 300 tons of bags, barrels and bundles of goods, hand-loaded by longshoremen, between ships docked in the islands of the Port of New York and the railroad terminals which lined the adjacent NJ mainland. Barges also have a lesser-known showboat history; they have operated in New York as floating theaters since 1845, bringing live entertainment to communities along New York's shores. Rescued from the mudflats by David Sharps in 1985, Barge 79 made Red Hook its homeport in 1994. This year the Museum celebrates its 30th year of providing Red Hook with arts and education programs. www.waterfrontmuseum.org
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