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NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP
TO PRESENT
HORIZON
CREATED, WRITTEN AND COMPOSED BY RINDE ECKERT
DIRECTED BY DAVID SCHWEIZER

BEGINNING PERFORMANCES FRIDAY, JUNE 1
AND OPENING TUESDAY, JUNE 5

FIRST PRODUCTION OF NYTW'S
25TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON

NEW YORK, MAY 2, 2007 - New York Theatre Workshop Artistic Director James C. Nicola and Managing Director Lynn Moffat have announced that Horizon, created, written and composed by Rinde Eckert, directed by David Schweizer, will begin performances Friday, June 1 at 8:00pm, at New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East 4th Street, between Second Avenue and Bowery. Opening night is scheduled for Tuesday, June 5 at 7:00pm.

Rinde Eckert, a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama,is renowned as a writer, composer, director and performer whose Opera / New Music Theatre productions have toured extensively. In Horizon, a work for three actors loosely based on the teachings of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Eckert plays Reinhart Poole, an unconventional theologian and teacher of ethics at a seminary. Reinhart, who has been pressured to resign by dogmatic powers within his church, works all night on his last lecture. He also talks with his wife, argues with the ghost of his brother, remembers conversations, and indulges his hobby: writing a comic allegory about two ageless masons who've been building the same church foundation for 1750 years. In story, song, movement, and music Reinhart, his family, and his strange masons inhabit a visually brilliant landscape, a moving and funny horizon.

James Nicola, NYTW's artistic director, says, "Rinde Eckert is an enormously talented artist whose work we have wanted to present for a long time. His work blends music, text, song and movement, expanding typical theatrical boundaries, while tackling meaningful subject matter that explores important issues of our world. It's now fitting that Rinde and Horizon kick off our 25th Anniversary Season as they both embody everything we strive for at NYTW."

Rinde Eckert says, "The basis for many of the ruminations in Horizon is a modest study of the life and ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr, an influential American theologian and social theorist. But although those familiar with Niebuhr’s ideas may see the ghost of them here, one ought not to strain the comparison. My grandfather Thomas D. Rinde, a Lutheran minister, taught religious history at a seminary in Fremont, Nebraska, also serving as its director for many years. I like to think he would be pleased to find himself implicated here in my imagined teacher Reinhart Poole."

Rinde Eckert is a composer, writer, performer and director. His Opera / New Music Theatre productions have toured throughout America , and to major festivals in Europe and Asia . He began his career as a writer/performer in the 1980’s, writing librettos for composer Paul Dresher. Working subsequently with choreographers Margaret Jenkins and Sarah Shelton Mann, Eckert began composing dance scores, including the evening-length Woman, Window, Square for The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. With the creation of his homage to Dante The Gardening of Thomas D in 1992, performed on tour in America and France, Eckert began composing and performing his own music/theater pieces. Recent work includes the Obie Award winning And God Created Great Whales (2001) produced by The Foundry Theatre; Highway Ulysses (2003) and Orpheus X (2006), both produced and commissioned by American Repertory Theatre; Horizon, a play with music and song (2005); and An Idiot Divine, an evening of two one-act solo operas. He wrote the libretto and sings in Steven Mackey’s oratorio Dream House, wrote and directed Sound Stage by Paul Dresher for the chamber ensemble Zeitgeist, and wrote and narrated the spoken text of Sandhills Reunion, a concert and recording with composer Jerry Granelli. Eckert has composed three CD’s of songs: Finding My Way Home, Do The Day Over, and Story In Story Out. Performance engagements in 2007 include Slow Fire with Paul Dresher / San Francisco; lead singer in Alternate Visions, a techno-opera / Montreal; Dream House with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project / Boston; An Idiot Divine / Fort Worth; Orpheus X / Scotland’s Edinburgh International Festival, and Horizon / on a national tour. Rinde Eckert’s work has been produced by ART, The Foundry Theatre, Center Stage in Baltimore , Culture Project, Dobama Theatre Company and Berkeley Repertory Theater, and has been directed by Robert Woodruff, Tony Taccone, Richard ET White, Ellen McLaughlin and David Schweizer. He has received two Critics Circle Awards and two Isadora Duncan Awards in San Francisco, an Obie Award and two Drama Desk Award Nominations in New York, and Boston’s Eliot Norton Award for Best Production by a Large Resident Company. He received the 2005 Marc Blitzstein Award given by The American Academy of Arts and Letters to a lyricist / librettist, and in 2007 became a Guggenheim Fellow. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Orpheus X. Rinde Eckert has taught at Princeton University and is the 2008 Granada Artist-in-Residence at the University of California at Davis. He lives in New York with his wife, Ellen McLaughlin, the playwright and actress.

David Schweizer has been directing and developing innovative new theater, performance and opera works for over thirty years both nationally and internationally. He emerged from Yale Drama School to make his New York debut at Lincoln Center for impresario Joseph Papp in 1974 with a radical re-imagining of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida starring the young Christopher Walken. This led to other world premieres by notable American playwrights such as Sam Shepard (Geography of a Horsedreamer), Ronald Tavel (The Last Days of British Honduras), Dennis Reardon (Siamese Connections) and many others in New York and at regional theaters such as the Yale Repertory Theater. During this early career period David also created an alternate young company at the Williamstown Theatre Festival which developed new work and toured, premiering works by Len Jenkin, Richard Nelson, John Ford Noonan, Michael Weller, Irene Fornes and David Mamet. It was also at this point that he directed his first opera, Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio, a notable success at Houston Grand Opera. In 1979, he was invited to Los Angeles to direct a play at the Mark Taper Forum and was subsequently invited to stay on as a staff director and to initiate a new play program there. From this alternate base in California Schweizer forged collaborations with other experimental theater troupes including Mabou Mines for whom he directed a multimedia piece called It's a Man's World which opened the new Los Angeles Theatre Center. At this time Schweizer's work began to fuse the impulses of text-based theater and more formally radical works, and he was invited to work in eastern Europe where he spent several years working at national theaters in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and also touring American-based works extensively. In the last decade, Schweizer has begun to somewhat specialize in music-driven theater events, often classic grand operas but sometimes other more experimental pieces. His production of Rinde Eckert's And God Created Great Whales was an OBIE Award winner in New York and has toured with great success finally playing the Barbican Center in London. At Long Beach Opera, he has mounted such notable productions as Henry Purcell's Indian Queen (in a new adaptation by Guillermo Gomez-Peña), Thomas Ades' provocative modern opera Powder Her Face and Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers. Now again based primarily in New York, David Schweizer continues to pursue a life in the theatrical arts that encompasses any and all forms that interest him. Last season off Broadway he directed a broad farce about race relations -White Chocolate, a poetic reverie by Charles Mee - Wintertime, and a song cycle featuring one lyricist and eighteen different composers - Songs from an Unmade Bed.

The cast of Horizon is David Barlow, Rinde Eckert and Howard Swain.

Set and lighting design for Horizon is by Alexander V. Nichols; sound design and operation by Gregory T. Kuhn; recordings composed and performed by Rinde Eckert.

Horizon was co-commissioned by the Lied Center for Performing Arts, a unit of the University of Nebraska; the Mondavi Center at the University of California, Davis; the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland; and Arts & Cultural Programming at Montclair State University, New Jersey. The world premiere was October 28, 2005 at the Johnny Carson Theatre at the University of Nebraska Lied Center in Lincoln.

New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), now celebrating its 25th season, is a leading voice in the world of Off-Broadway and within the theatre community in New York and around the world. NYTW has emerged as a premiere incubator of important new theatre, honoring its mission to explore perspectives on our collective history and respond to the events and institutions that shape our lives. In addition, NYTW is known for its innovative adaptations of classic repertory. Each season, from its home in New York's East Village neighborhood, NYTW presents five to seven new productions, over 80 readings, and numerous workshop productions, for over 60,000 audience members. Over the past twenty-five years, NYTW has developed and produced over 100 new, fully staged works, including Jonathan Larson's Rent, Tony Kushner's Slavs! and Homebody/Kabul, Doug Wright's Quills, Claudia Shear's Blown Sideways Through Life and Dirty Blonde, Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told and Valhalla, and Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, Far Away, and A Number. The 2002 remounting of Martha Clarke's seminal work Vienna: Lusthaus and subsequent American tour was one of the longest-running productions in NYTW's history. NYTW supports artists in all stages of their careers by maintaining a series of workshop programs including work-in-progress readings, summer residencies, and minority artist fellowships. In 1991, NYTW received an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement and in 2000 was designated to be part of the Leading National Theatres Program by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Horizon plays at New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East 4th Street, between Second Avenue and Bowery. The regular performance schedule is Tuesday at 7:00pm, Wednesday through Friday at 8:00pm, Saturday at 3:00pm and 8:00pm, and Sunday at 2:00pm and 7:00pm. The running time is approximately 90 minutes with no intermission. Tickets are $50 and, beginning May 9, may be purchased online at www.telecharge.com, 24 hours a day, seven days a week or by phoning Telecharge.com at (212) 239-6200. For exact dates and times of performance, call Telecharge.com.

Maintaining its commitment to making theatre accessible to all theatergoers, NYTW continues its CheapTix program in which all tickets for all Sunday evening performances will cost $20. Tickets may be purchased in advance, payable in cash only, and are available in person only at the NYTW Box Office. And for all performances, student tickets cost $20, based on availability, and can be purchased in advance from the NYTW Box Office with valid student identification. The NYTW Box Office is open 1:00pm to 6:00pm, Tuesday through Saturday.