After eight years with NewYorkRep, I have made the difficult decision to step down from my leadership role to commit more deeply to my freelance directing and my work as Assistant Professor of performance at the University of Kansas.
I am profoundly grateful to everyone at NewYorkRep for their commitment to telling stories that inspire and compel social change. Serving as Co-President and Producing Artistic Director has been a gratifying experience, and I want to thank our board, staff, collaborators, and everyone in the community that has supported our organization's mission.
"NewYorkRep" was christened on the fly while filling in the "company name" field of the NYC Fringe Festival application. It was 2012, and I was acting on a burning desire to direct David Don Miller's Why You Beasting?, a viciously honest comedy about the dysfunction of our urban public school system. NewYorkRep's impact and growth began just as quickly as it had been named. We became the first production to sell out its entire opening run at the Flamboyan Theater on the Lower East Side. When we transferred to The Players Theatre off-Broadway, we received a Time Out NY Critics' Pick and saw lines wrapped around the corner at every performance.
In 2013, we carried this momentum into our next co-production, Eliza Bent and Dave Malloy's Black Wizard/Blue Wizard at the Incubator Arts Project. We were excited to hear Perez Hilton call the show "The closest thing we've ever seen to a stoner musical! And that's not a bad thing...blissfully surreal!"
A particularly triumphant highlight was our production of Stalking the Bogeyman, which developed in New York City, premiered at the North Carolina Stage Company, and enjoyed a critically acclaimed commercial run at New World Stages. This story about childhood sexual abuse and redemption inspired many to speak out when few were willing to do so. This outpouring illustrates the cathartic, healing power of storytelling that embodies NewYorkRep's mission to inspire and compel social change through theater.
The following year, we partnered with London producer David Adkin to bring Our Friends The Enemy: The 1914 Christmas Truce to Theatre Row. This partnership led to the production of Stalking the Bogeyman at the Southwark Playhouse in London in 2016, where we partnered with The Telling Company, setting the groundwork for our companies to join forces.
The Telling Company had been, up to this point, a 501(c)(3) organization with an esteemed board of directors. They had produced a reading series, a documentary podcast about chronic illness and overcoming disability, a short film, and Gayle Waxenberg's play, A Bitter Pill, which explores the corruption of Big Pharma.
After the two companies came together, we have developed and produced deeply meaningful projects. Some highlights include our co-production of Jason Odell William's Church & State, a blistering examination of gun violence in America, led by lead producer Charlotte Cohn at New World Stages; A Wall Apart, a world premiere musical by Air Supply's Graham Russel at NYMF; and a co-production of Imagine: Yemen, in which nine playwrights created shorts about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, staged at the Signature Theatre. For the last two years, we developed Paris Crayton III's stunning new play, Chasing Gods, which had a workshop production in collaboration with Kansas Repertory Theatre. We were slated to open the play this past fall off-Broadway until our world shuttered.
Since the shutdown, I have looked at my life, examined my priorities, and made the difficult decision to step away from my leadership role.
Serving and sharing stories with NewYorkRep has helped me grow in ways that I never imagined. In the months ahead, I will continue to focus on developing new plays and musicals and will continue to engage communities around the country in dialogue about local, national, and global issues through innovative new works. I will continue to fight for an equitable American theatre that represents a daring, diverse, and inclusive body of work.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your unending support. I am eager to champion NewYorkRep's next chapter of growth and look forward to collaborating on a new animated short film of Stalking the Bogeyman later this year.
For anyone that is used to communicating with me at my NYR email address, you can now contact me at Markus@MarkusPotter.com
With Love and Gratitude,
Markus Potter