"THE IRON HEEL" THROUGH OCT. 11TH

It's the 27th century. The world has been at peace for 400 years. A troupe of actors unfamiliar with injustice and war uncovers a woman revolutionist's memoir of finding love during the bloody struggle against burgeoning fascism in the 20th century. The players from the future celebrate the love and courage of the 20th century revolutionists in an operetta, incorporating the eccentric and circus-like movements of early 20th century workers' theater.

 

Jack London's 1908 novel, THE IRON HEEL, envisions the course of world events in the early decades of the 20th century, as the workers of the world organized against militarism and big business. His imaginative projections ring true for 21st century audiences living and loving in a time of mercenary wars, stolen elections, union busting, and corporate bailouts.

 

ELIZABETH RUF-MALDONADO, Ph.D., has performed, directed, taught, and written in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is the recipient of a Latino Arts Advancement Project Grant for Don Giovanni Rumbero: Love in Seville, a Spanglish adaptation of Mozart and da Ponte’s Don Giovanni performed at the Nuyorican Poets Café, which she wrote, directed, and conceived for Afro-Cuban instrumentation.

 

She has performed many leading roles at Theater for the New City, notably in socially and politically engaged historical musical theater pieces authored by Laurel Hessing, composed by Arthur Abrams, and directed by TNC’s Executive/Artistic Director, Crystal Field. These plays and roles include: Sketching Utopia, Undena, the early twentieth-century matriarch of the single-tax community still in existence at Free Acres, New Jersey; The Golden Bear (based on Jews Without Money, Mike Gold’s memoir of life on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s), Lena, a Hungarian immigrant machine operator and union activist; and The Further Adventures of Uncle Wiggily: Windblown Visitors (which places the animal protagonists of Howard Garis’s Uncle Wiggily in flood-ravaged New Orleans and a gentrifying New York City), Lola the 5th Avenue hawk. She also performed a leading role in the world premiere of Dream Star Café, by Puerto Rican Playwright Jack Agüeros at TNC.

 

She has consistently meshed her scholarly and cultural work with activism. In 2000 she traveled with 100 community activists from the Lower East Side to Vieques, Puerto Rico, where she advocated for withdrawal of the U.S. Marines from the island by directing and presenting a collective theater piece that incorporated U.S. and Puerto-Rican activists, as well as children, elders, and musicians from the Vieques community. She was a member of the first International Work Brigades to Nicaragua and a co-founder of a Lower East Side CISPES group in the early 1980s. She is a member of U.S./Cuba Labor Exchange and a doctoral graduate of Columbia University with a thesis on the performance of blackness in contemporary theater in Cuba. Her published writings include a 1986 interview with then Nicaraguan National Theater Director, Alan Bolt, and a piece on performances of gender, color, and nationalism at Cuba’s Tropicana Nightclub.

 

She worked many times with Theater of the Oppressed founder Augusto Boal and spearheaded/facilitated a workshop at the Brecht Forum in New York between Augusto Boal and the Immigrant Worker’s Association of New York, where she also taught English and leadership training classes. Her teaching of college students and immigrant adults at Henry Street Settlement in New York, Casa Aztlan and Daley College in Chicago, Rancho Santiago Community College in Southern California, Columbia University, Hunter College, and Boricua College has always incorporated movement-based theater improvisations and short plays developed by students around their own experiences. Elizabeth is a full time faculty member at Boricua College in Brooklyn. She has recently directed groups of Boricua College students in original Spanglish and Spanish-language adaptations of Shakespeare and Ibsen, as well as a dance-theater setting of an original “Urban Book” scripted by a Boricua College student and performed at the Theaters at 45 Bleecker Street.

 

Based on the Novel by Jack London
Conceived, Written, and Directed by Elizabeth Ruf-Maldonado
Music Composed and Arranged by Arthur Abrams

Charles Casano, Stage Manager
Alex Bartenieff, Lighting Design
Richard Reta, Set Design
Susan Lasanta Gittens, Costume Consultant

With: Aldo Cano, Ashleigh Awusie, Collin Rhyins, Elizabeth Ruf-Maldonado, Justin Rodriguez, Kat Yew, Lenin Alevante, Louis Williams, Paulina Brahm, Rob Hollander, and Sonny Malick

 

Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue at 10th Street, Manhattan

September 24 – October 11, 2009

Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 pm; Sundays at 3 pm

Admission $10 / TDF