Playing with Heiner Müller

Meet Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Hamlet, Ophelia, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertolt Brecht, talk-show host Sally McNally, all part of a virtual parade of 76 characters -- famous, infamous and fictional -- and all played by a talented and spirited ensemble of five actors. This startling theatrical montage with 17 songs and raps is the Castillo Theatre's latest foray into material by Heiner Müller, the East German playwright/poet who enraged the authorities before the Berlin wall came down, but never defected or repudiated communism. Performed by an all-Black ensemble of five extraordinary actors (Keldrick Crowder, Fulton Hodges, Ava Jenkins, Sylenia Lewis and John Rankin), Playing with Heiner Müller tears down the iron curtain between drama and comedy, the personal and the political, the modern and the postmodern, Black theatre and the avant-garde.

Selected Saturdays throughout the year

Act 1: Get on the bus! Join fellow adventurers as we travel to the longest-running performance in New York City. Young people of the All Stars Talent Show Network are building positive Hip Hop theatre in their neighborhoods. Join them as they grow and develop themselves and their communities. Act 2: Come see the talent in all of us and help give the All Stars Project Award for Community Spirit to our wonderful young performers! A unique NY experience.

Contact Jenny Zak for details of the next Back to School trip at 212-356-8441.

The Proverbial Loons

Musical Comedy Improv at Castillo

Selected Fridays and Saturdays throughout the season

Meet the Proverbial Loons, Castillo's new comedy improv troupe. Veterans of New York's and Castillo's stages come together with some new faces to create new material each night. Audience members can volunteer and watch your life transformed into a zany musical! Or just watch and enjoy the show. It's gonna be ridiculous – and wonderfully entertaining.

January 21 - February 20, 2011

This semi-autobiographical work, set in the Bronx of the 1940s, was Fred Newman's first full-length play, originally produced in 1986. Playing with philosophy, theatrical forms and storytelling, Mr. Hirsch Died Yesterday explores human identity and shared history when a Jewish writer named Fred meets an African American woman named Freda and find they share more than childhood memories. Can two people have the same history?

March 4-6 and June 24-26, 2011

Castillo Theatre runs NYC's most vibrant performance school for youth. (And it's free for young people from all communities!) We are helping bring forth a new generation of playwrights. Come hear what diverse new writers from the community have to say, as they grow and develop their voices. This festival features new plays written and performed by graduates of the Youth Onstage! Community Performance School, directed by faculty of the school. Two great weekends packed with exciting new theatre!

April 29 - June 5, 2011

License to Dream brings together nine inner-city youth and six professional modern dancer/aerialists from the acclaimed Dzul Dance company. This provocative musical is set at a summer dance camp for underprivileged kids, "Camp Development," in the Hamptons. Neither the underpaid dance counselors nor the poor campers want to be there, and certainly not with each other. With songs by Newman-Truskinoff and choreography by Javier Dzul, sparks fly when East New York meets East Hampton. Though only 90 miles apart, the distance between those who dream and those who have no reason to, requires more than a bridge to connect them.