Mission Statement
A Festival of Fools is a non-profit theater company based in New York City.
It is our mission to provide audiences with an experience that serves as a retreat from the mediums of film and television. Using a template inspired by the Elizabethan verse play, we are committed to placing language at the forefront of our productions as a mechanism through which to explore mythology and folklore. At the same time, we seek to visually captivate through acrobatics, and mask. While we are determined to stage effective productions of established verse plays, our primary goal is to produce new ones tailored for a contemporary audience - in regards to length, and vernacular. It is our deepest feeling that focusing on these elements will allow us to provide our audience with engaging and exciting performances that are both cost efficient and affordable.
Company History
A Festival of Fools was launched immediately following Act II Scene III of Henry the Fourth Part One. After a performing the role of Hotspur at NYU, I decided to test out a theory expressed by playwright David Mamet. His essay True and False challenges aspiring actors to spend less time auditioning and more time producing their own work. Hence, I decided to brave the treacherous waters of self-production in exchange for the opportunity to choose whatever role, large or small, I felt compelled to play.
This ambition channeled itself into The Tragical of History of Doctor Faustus 2009 C-Text. The text of the play, widely understood to be truncated and tampered with, displays some of the best work from Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan playwright, and contemporary of William Shakespeare. An aspiring poet myself, I assumed the task of reconstructing the text in an attempt to arrange a piece that was both accessible to modern audiences and more in step with the themes of Marlowe's contributions.
The free show ran for two rain soaked weekends in June 2009 at the Music Pagoda in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. The experience was so fulfilling that I decided to form a company.
Having chosen a verse play based on German folklore for our first production, I decided to choose a verse play based on Irish mythology for our second. The result was a production of On Baile's Strand by W.B. Yeats which was performed at BRIC Studio in Brooklyn in November 2009. No longer subject to the elements the show earned us the financial traction to bring our work to Manhattan. It also marked the realization of the company identity - verse dramas inspired by world myth.
Our third production, "Act the Fool", was performed in April 2010 at the Looking Glass Theater. It featured the debut of an original verse play, A Game Without A Name, that I co-wrote with our resident playwright, the Indomitable Impostor. The work is heavily inspired by both Abrahamic and Native American mythology and serves as the blueprint for our original work: verse dramas with a 25 min. running time written in a contemporary vernacular featuring masks.
Still compelled to tackle the classics, in August of 2010 we returned to the Music Pagoda and performed the great Spanish epic La Vida es Sueno (Life is a Dream) by Pedro Calderon de la Barca. It featured a spectacular new translation of the text by local LIU professor Gregary J. Racz and featured swordplay choerographed in the style of spanish rapier! We had our single largest audience turn out to date, and were blessed with absolutely gorgeous weather throughout the run. It was the validation of the mission embarked upon a year earlier and are now completely committed to bringing free theater to the park every summer.
After a brief hiatus in the fall, we opened our 2011 season with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's Rough Magic, a straight prose play, though heavily influenced by The Tempest and featuring many themes pertaining to myth and magic. Mounted at the Center for Performance Research in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the production had an excellent turnout and received an enthusiastically positive review.
In March, we’re producing the first show of our Interim Series, a one-night showcase entitled Downfalls: Shakespearean Moments of Doom, a selection of the Bard’s scenes from different plays, all connected by the theme of fantastic destruction. Each scene will be directed by a different director, allowing us to collaborate with members of the NYC verse theater community. This will be our first foray into producing Shakespeare, and we hope that our spin on it will spark new interest in some of the works from which we are drawing.
Our next endeavor is the production of a brand new, completely original five-act verse play that I wrote this winter, Impostor Striketh Back, a follow-up to A Game Without A Name. Fans of old Westerns, Star Wars, ghost stories, pirates, gambling, verse, old myths, new ideas, and light saber fighting will want to stay tuned.
Artistic Director
Tim Bungeroth
This ambition channeled itself into The Tragical of History of Doctor Faustus 2009 C-Text. The text of the play, widely understood to be truncated and tampered with, displays some of the best work from Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan playwright, and contemporary of William Shakespeare. An aspiring poet myself, I assumed the task of reconstructing the text in an attempt to arrange a piece that was both accessible to modern audiences and more in step with the themes of Marlowe's contributions.
The free show ran for two rain soaked weekends in June 2009 at the Music Pagoda in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. The experience was so fulfilling that I decided to form a company.
Having chosen a verse play based on German folklore for our first production, I decided to choose a verse play based on Irish mythology for our second. The result was a production of On Baile's Strand by W.B. Yeats which was performed at BRIC Studio in Brooklyn in November 2009. No longer subject to the elements the show earned us the financial traction to bring our work to Manhattan. It also marked the realization of the company identity - verse dramas inspired by world myth.
Our third production, "Act the Fool", was performed in April 2010 at the Looking Glass Theater. It featured the debut of an original verse play, A Game Without A Name, that I co-wrote with our resident playwright, the Indomitable Impostor. The work is heavily inspired by both Abrahamic and Native American mythology and serves as the blueprint for our original work: verse dramas with a 25 min. running time written in a contemporary vernacular featuring masks.
Still compelled to tackle the classics, in August of 2010 we returned to the Music Pagoda and performed the great Spanish epic La Vida es Sueno (Life is a Dream) by Pedro Calderon de la Barca. It featured a spectacular new translation of the text by local LIU professor Gregary J. Racz and featured swordplay choerographed in the style of spanish rapier! We had our single largest audience turn out to date, and were blessed with absolutely gorgeous weather throughout the run. It was the validation of the mission embarked upon a year earlier and are now completely committed to bringing free theater to the park every summer.
After a brief hiatus in the fall, we opened our 2011 season with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's Rough Magic, a straight prose play, though heavily influenced by The Tempest and featuring many themes pertaining to myth and magic. Mounted at the Center for Performance Research in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the production had an excellent turnout and received an enthusiastically positive review.
In March, we’re producing the first show of our Interim Series, a one-night showcase entitled Downfalls: Shakespearean Moments of Doom, a selection of the Bard’s scenes from different plays, all connected by the theme of fantastic destruction. Each scene will be directed by a different director, allowing us to collaborate with members of the NYC verse theater community. This will be our first foray into producing Shakespeare, and we hope that our spin on it will spark new interest in some of the works from which we are drawing.
Our next endeavor is the production of a brand new, completely original five-act verse play that I wrote this winter, Impostor Striketh Back, a follow-up to A Game Without A Name. Fans of old Westerns, Star Wars, ghost stories, pirates, gambling, verse, old myths, new ideas, and light saber fighting will want to stay tuned.
Artistic Director
Tim Bungeroth
