New show at NYLA in April!

Half Straddle's new show, GHOST RINGS, is premiering at New York Live Arts in April.
Get your TICKETS now and find out more on our SHOW PAGE!

STARRING CHRIS GIARMO, ERIN MARKEY + KRISTEN SIEH with TINA SATTER

GHOST RINGS unfurls a narrative of contemporary friendship and family-making told through virtuosic performances and evocative design. Mixing deadpan magical realism with the considerations of feminist thinkers, the resulting piece is a tender, harrowingly funny, unexpected musical experience.

HOUSE OF DANCE

Written and Directed by: Tina Satter

Performers: Jess Barbagallo Jim Fletcher Elizabeth DeMent Paul Pontrelli

Composer/Music Director: Chris Giarmo

Choreographer: Hannah Heller

Set Design: Andreea Mincic

Lighting Design: Zack Tinkelman

Costume Design: Enver Chakartash

Producer: Richard Maxwell

Associate Producer: Lindsay Hockaday

Stage Manager: Randi Rivera

Production Interns: Eric Larson and Hanna Lea Novak

Publicity: Blake Zidell & Associates

Opens: October 23th, 2013 Abrons Arts Center, New York City

SEAGULL (Thinking of you)

Writer/director Tina Satter draws on Chekhov’s letters, translations, and perverse sense of comedy to consider anew the darkness, beauty, and history of Chekhov’s iconic play The Seagull and its resonances with her Half Straddle ensemble. Seagull (Thinking of you) is a personal look at performance, failure, and attempted love — ultimately an unexpected meditation on why we ever try to say something out loud. With a Russian folk metal-influenced score.

Commissioned by PS122, co-presented with The New Ohio Theatre

PS122 Coil Festival »

Jan 9, 11, 17, 19 8pm Jan 10, 12, 18 10pm Jan 15 5pm Jan 22, 23, 25 8pm Jan 26 2pm

New Ohio Theatre 154 Christopher St., Manhattan

$20 / $15 students, seniors

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IN THE PONY PALACE/FOOTBALL

Written + Directed by Tina Satter

Music Arranged by Chris Giarmo + Bobby McElver

New York City debut presented by the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn, NY, February 10 - 26, 2011

“a giddily exuberant confection that manages to conjure a distinctively eccentric theatrical world” Jason Zinoman, New York Times Critic's Pick!

“launching a goal-line drive to a new feminist form” Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

“The specific vision and big, playful imagination is something our theatre will need in spades.” Matt Roberson, nytheatre.com

Tina Satter and Half Straddle named as an Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch! by Time Out New York Running time: 70 minutes

An all-female cast portrays the players, coaches and cheerleaders of a high school football team. With the historically-male and highly American backdrop of football, the piece considers what it is to be a female athlete; the shifting stakes, relationships and power dynamics of a team on and off the field; and the concept of placing belief and commitment in something bigger than oneself. The text combines the specific lexicon of football, sports and coaching with the awkward realism of high school-speak. A live score blending deconstructed pop songs accompanies the performance arranged by Chris Giarmo (Big Dance Theater) and Bobby McElver (The Wooster Group).

Casey Yorke | Assistant Director William Burke | Football Choreography Zack Tinkelman | Lighting Design Andreea Mincic | Set Design Michael De Angeles | Costume Design Liz Nielsen | Stage Manager

Starring | Moe Angelos, Jess Barbagallo, Eliza Bent, Nikki Calonge, Emily Emily Davis, Erin Markey, Glennis McMurray, Kourtney Rutherford, Julia Sirna-Frest

The Pony Palace Marching Band is Justin Dayhoff, Jon Lijoi, Bobby McElver, Mary Rasmussen

NURSES IN NEW ENGLAND

Written + Directed by Tina Satter Music by Chris Giarmo

A co-production of The ICE Factory 2010 Performed at the Ohio Theater, New York City, July 28 – 31, 2010

“Nurses in New England is a funny, charming show by a theatre company I want to see more of … most successful is the way in which playwright Tina Satter manages to create a smart, comic mirror of the medical show genre without every venturing into spoof.” nytheater.com

“With great music, humorous lyrics and comically creepy medical jargon, Tina, a native New Englander, tells her New York audience what it’s like to run a hospital in a small town by the sea.” Lina Zeldovich, womanaroundtown.com Running time: 75 minutes

The language of television hospital dramas is given an unexpected comedic and bittersweet spin in stacking up life and death against our most mundane desires. A female head of surgery and her nursing staff secret smoke, bitch and moan, and find the magic in their starkly beautiful small-town hospital.

Zack Tinkelman | Lighting Design Andreea Mincic | Set Design Michael De Angeles | Costume Design Eliza Laytner | Stage Manager Starring | Jess Barbagallo, Eliza Bent, Emily Emily Davis, Erin Markey, Annie McNamara, Lena Moy-Borgen, Kourtney Rutherford, Julia Sirna-Frest, Greg Zuccolo

The Nurses in New England band was Chris Giarmo, Matt Bogdanow, Shane Chapman

AWAY UNIFORM

Running time: 60 minutes

With unsettling humor, physical inventiveness, and an attempt to find transcendence in even the smallest moments, the play imagines a separate place where sports drills, ritualistic recreation, and an ongoing merging of a personal past, present, and future feels disturbingly necessary and like a kind of home.

Writer/director Tina Satter uses her poetically tinged approach to the language and feelings of sports as a textual layer to create a world out on the Plains where two young women re-make family and friendship.

Highly regarded experimental performers Pete Simpson, Jess Barbagallo, and Emily Davis are supported with an original score by composer Chris Giarmo.

Preview showing at Other Forces Festival, Incubator Arts Project, New York, NY, February 2012

Supported in part by the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

FAMILY

A co-production of The Ontological-Hysteric TheaterMusic by Chris Giarmo

Performed at the Ontological-Hysteric, New York City, August 13 – 22, 2009

Named a Top 10 Show of 2009 by Time Out New York

“Ridiculous, enchanting musical Family... full to the brim with killer talent.” Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

“Family re-invents downtown experimental theater for the new millennium—and has a tremendous lot of fun doing it.” Heather J. Violanti, nytheater.com

Running time: 75 minutes.

Twenty-year old Lily is about to be impregnated with Rudolf Nureyev’s frozen sperm to make her mother happy. Little sister Frarajaca wants to stage an artistic gangbang. And Mum doesn’t want to deal with anymore goddamn idiots. It’s a family drama. Sort of. Writer/director Tina Satter’s new one-act is an unexpected, musically-enhanced, and close-up look at the ridiculous and inexplicable nature of families and the kinds of love we can’t escape.

Zack Tinkelman | Lighting Design Nathan Lemoine | Set Design Normandy Sherwood | Costume Design Wayne Petro | Stage Manager Starring | Eliza Bent, Sarah Copeland, Emily Emily Davis, Joseph Keckler, Erin Markey, Katherine Scharhon, Julia Sirna-Frest, Rae C Wright

GHOST RINGS

(Work-in-Progress)

Being developed with text and direction by Tina Satter, in collaboration with composer Chris Giarmo and singer/performer Erin Markey, Ghost Rings is a fully-sung-through piece about two sisters -- and their animated spirit animals -- as they navigate the darkest edges of what they know.

Excerpts of the piece in-progress have been shown at CATCH Performance Series and IRT.

Written and directed by Tina Satter