THE SCARLET IBISTHE SCARLET IBIS

STEFAN WEISMAN is a composer living in New York City. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times described his music as "personal, moody and skillfully wrought." When his song "Twinkie" was featured on the nationally syndicated program The Wendy Williams Show, the host said, "Very unique...You're not going to hear opera like this anywhere else...Fabulous!" His compositions include chamber, orchestral, theater, dance and choral pieces, and he has specialized in vocal works that explore edgy and compelling topics. His opera Darkling, commissioned by American Opera Projects, was included in the Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series, premiered to great acclaim at the East 13th Street Theater and toured Europe in 2007. It was released by Albany Records in November 2011. His one-act opera Fade, commissioned by the British opera company Second Movement, premiered in London in 2008 and also had successful productions in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Brooklyn. He is currently developing an evening length opera, The Scarlet Ibis, at the HERE Arts Center. Among his other commissions are works for Bang on a Can, Sequitur, and the Empire City Men's Choir. In 2012, Inside Jersey Magazine selected him as one of twenty-one artists from New Jersey who are "breaking big."

He is a graduate of Bard College (BA), Yale University (MA), and Princeton University (PhD). His composition instructors include David Lang, Joan Tower, Daron Hagen, Martin Bresnick, Steven Mackey, and Paul Lansky. Presently, he is on the faculty of the Bard High School Early College in Queens, New York. He has also taught at Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, the City College of New York, CUNY, and the Princeton University Department of Music. His music is available on New Amsterdam Records and Albany Records.

David Cote is an opera librettist, playwright and critic based in New York City.

Recent operas include: Blind Injustice at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, and Lucidity—world premiere by On Site Opera in NYC followed by its Northwest premiere at Seattle Opera. Lucidity is heading to La Monnaie in Brussels in 2027.

Plays include The Müch, Saint Joe, and Aristotle Punches Down (National Playwrights Conference semifinalist).

Previous operas include Blind Injustice for Cincinnati Opera; Three Way at Nashville Opera and BAM; The Scarlet Ibis at the Prototype festival; and We’ve Got Our Eye on You (SUNY New Paltz) and 600 Square Feet (Cleveland Opera Theater), the last two with composer Nkeiru Okoye. David also wrote the text for Okoye’s Black Lives Matter piece for baritone and orchestra, Invitation to a Die-In. Other vocal pieces: Cocoa Cantata (a sequel to Bach’s Coffee Cantata), composed by Robert Paterson, and dating-app song cycles with Paterson, In Real Life. Recordings: Blind Injustice (NAXOS), Three Way (American Modern Recordings) and In Real Life (AMR). Individual acts from Three Way have been presented by companies across the country, including Opera Memphis, Opera Orlando, Shreveport Opera, and Fargo Moorhead Opera.

David was born and adopted in New Hampshire and lives in Manhattan. He has been honored with residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Ucross, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and elsewhere. He was selected for the inaugural year of the Ecker Fellowship, in which the New England Foundation for Psychoanalysis pairs artists with psychoanalysts. Proud alumnus of Bard College.

As an actor, David worked with Richard Foreman (Pearls for Pigs); exiled Iranian auteur Assurbanipal Babilla; and Richard Maxwell, Robert Cucuzza and D.J. Mendel, among others. He directed Babilla's acclaimed monologue Something Something Über Alles (Das Jackpot) for its world premiere, and the 2013 revival with Robert Honeywell, co-founder of Williamsburg’s Brick Theater. He also directed Honeywell in Matthew Freeman’s monologue, The Sea The Mountains The Forest The City The Plain at the Brick.

As a journalist, David’s TV and theater reviews appear in The A.V. Club, Observer, 4 Columns, American Theatre and elsewhere. He was the longest serving theater editor and chief drama critic of Time Out New York. His writing has also appeared in Opera News, The Village Voice, The Guardian, and The New York Times. He’s the author of companion books about the Broadway hits Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Wicked, Jersey Boys and Spring Awakening.

For the Best Plays Yearbook series, David contributed essays on Shining City, Blackbird and The Receptionist. In the 1990s, he co-founded and edited the grassroots theater magazines OFF: a journal of alternative theater and EdgeNY.

Mallory Catlett is an Obie award winning creator/director of performance across disciplines; from opera and music theater to plays and installation art. Her works have premiered in New York at 3LD, HERE, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, PS122, Abrons Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory, The Collapsable Hole and the Ohio Theatre, and have been featured at the Ice Factory, CultureMart, COIL, Prelude and BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Regionally, her work has been seen at EMPAC (Troy NYC), American Repertory Theater (Cambridge), ASU Gammage (Tempe), DiverseWorks (Houston), Z Space (San Francisco) & Redfern Center (Keene, NH). International touring includes Les Escales improbables (Montreal), Kilkenny Arts Festival (Ireland), Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Scotland), Dublin Fringe, (Ireland) Exit Festival (Créteil, France), Noorderzon Festival (Groningen, Netherlands), Adelaide Festival (Australia), Brighton Festival and Bristol’s Mayfest (UK) and the PuSh Festival (Canada).

She has worked with visual artists Dread Scott (Decision) and Nene Humphrey (Circling the Center, Transmission, Lining Out), media artists Keith Skretch (This Was The End, Archive, Decoder), Jim Findlay (City Council Meeting) and Peter Norrman (Red Fly Blue Bottle, Tinder) and sound artists Lea Bertucci (Dead Time of Plenty) and G Lucas Crane (OH WHAT WAR, This Was The End, Archive, Decoder). She has directed new operas and music theater works by composers Eve Beglarian (The Vicksburg Project), Mika Karlsson (The Echo Drift, 2018), Stefan Weissman (Scarlet Ibis), Aaron Seigel (Brother Brother), Tarik O’Regan (Wanton Sublime), Christina Campanella (Red Fly Blue Bottle, Tinder), Dave Malloy (Beowulf, Space//Space, The Sewers) and James Beckwith Maxwell (Sleepy Head).

Fascinated by time and our relationship to it, her performances often adapt pre-existing texts - William Burroughs, Jack Kerouc, Allen Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Brecht, Rimbaud, Margaret Sanger, Marguerite Duras, Joan Littlewood, Patrik Ouredník, Oswald Spengler, Alfred Korzybski, Louise Bogan, Andy Warhol, Chekhov, Proust, The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott Decision, City Council Meeting Transcripts and a Civil War Diary. She recently completed her first libretto with composer Aaron Seigel, Rainbird, adapting a Janet Frame novel.

She has written about her work in Canadian Theatre Review ("Madness and Method in This Room Is Moving” Number 119 Summer 2004), Contemporary Spanish Plays (Introduction to Off Side by Sergi Belbel, vol 35, 2012), Theater (“City Council Meeting” Script and Essay, Volume 43, Issue 3 Fall 2013), Performance Research (This Was The End: the pseudoscopic effect” Vol 23, No.8 January 2019), PAJ (“Decoding the Reality Studio” with Alex Wermer-Colan and G Lucas Crane, Vol 42, Issue 2 - May 2020) and is currently working on her first book with Aaron Landsman called No Is Qualified: City Council Meeting for Iowa University Press.

She received her high school diploma from the North Carolina School for the Arts, where she studied classical ballet, a BA from Bard College in Drama and Dance and an Interdisciplinary MFA from The School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where she continued to directed and dramaturged 10 works for theater, opera and dance.

From 2004-2013 Catlett was an ensemble member of Banana Bag & Bodice where she directed Space//Space, The Fall & Rise of the Rising Fallen, The Sewers, Panel.Animal and The Young War and co-directed the touring version of Beowulf with Rod Hipskind. She is a longtime collaborator with playwright and director Aaron Landsman with whom she co-created with designer Jim Findlay City Council Meeting, and directed Patient Boy, and Running Away From the One with the Knife. She has also worked on plays by – Tanya Marquardt, Masha Marianna Salzmann, Harold Pinter, Kuro Tanino, Stephanie Fleischman, Kristen Kosmos, Anne Washburn, Toshiki Okada, Sergi Belbel, Thomas Bradshaw, Normand Chaurette, Lluissa Cunille, Guillem Clua, Xiemena Escalante, Christina Masciotti, Jason Craig and Naomi Wallace.

Catlett was a member of the 2006 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and she has been a resident artist at Mount Tremper Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, CultureHub, MacDowell, Gibney Dance, Performing Garage, the Ontological’s Incubator, Abrons Arts Center, HERE’s HARP Program, Mabou Mines, Yaddo, Chashama, Digital Performance Institute, The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and a British Studies Fellow at the Harry Ransom Research Center at UT-Austin. Her work has been funded by the Jerome Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York Council for the Humanities, Graham Foundation, New York State Music Fund, NPN, NYSCA, LMCC (MCAF and Swing Space grants), Puffin Foundation, NYSCA (2 individual artist commissions), Edith Lutyens & Norman Bel Geddes Fund, Tobin Theatre Arts Fund, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Strickland Family Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, MAP Fund, NEFA, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She received the Elliott Hayes Award for Dramaturgy for her co-direction of the Juggernaut’s series THE FIRST 100 YEARS: The Professional Female Playwright. She curated the Martin E Segal’s Spotlight: Catalan Reading and Translation Series (2010). She is the recipient of the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts 2015 Grants to Artists Award and a 2016 Creative Capital Grantee. She is an associate artist at CultureHub, a member of the Collapsable Hole an artist-run development and performance venue at the Westbeth Arts Center, the co-artistic director of Mabou Mines, and the artistic director of Restless Productions NYC whose work received a Special Citation Obie and a Bessie and Henry Hewes Award for Design.

Steven Osgood (music director) has conducted the world premieres of over two dozen operas, including Sumeida’s Song, The Scarlett Ibis and Thumbprint for the PROTOTYPE Festival. Other notable premieres include As One, The Long Walk (Beck/Fleischman), Breaking the Waves (Mazzoli/ Vavrek), and JFK (Little/Vavrek). He has been the Conductor Mentor for Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative, leading the premieres of six of their commissioned works. His conducting credits include L’Opera de Montreal, New York City Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Atlanta Opera, Opera Memphis, Opera Columbus, Manhattan School of Music, and the Juilliard School. He has been on the music staff of the Metropolitan Opera since 2006.

As Artistic Director of American Opera Projects from 2001 to 2008 he created the company’s prestigious Composers & the Voice fellowship program which has fostered the careers of over 50 composers and librettists. Osgood has been General and Artistic Director of the Chautauqua Opera Company since 2016. The company’s 2019 season included Chautauqua’s first festival weekend, featuring performances of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, ¡Figaro! (90210) and The Ghosts of Versailles on three consecutive days. Chautauqua Opera’s 2020 season will include Tosca, Kamala Sankaram’s Thumbprint, and The Mother Of Us All.

Born in Korea and raised in Hawai’i, Tom Lee is a director, designer and puppet artist. Mr. Lee began his career at La MaMa Experimental Theater in New York with the encouragement of Ellen Stewart and later, the St. Ann’s Warehouse Puppet Lab. His work often explores the synthesis of manipulated figures and objects using film techniques and animation. Tom Lee creates original puppet theater pieces, performs as a professional puppeteer, designs and fabricates puppets through Chicago Puppet Studio and serves to elevate puppetry through his teaching and mentorship.

Mr. Lee’s original puppet theater work includes Sounding the Resonant Path (La MaMa, Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, Pesta Boneka Festival Indonesia), Akutagawa (Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, US Tour), Shank’s Mare (Tours in US, Hawai’i, Japan and France) Kurokami (Asian Improv Arts Midwest), Hoplite Diary (St. Ann’s, La MaMa), Tomte (Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival), Ko’olau (La MaMa/Hawai’i tour), Eden (NY State Puppet Festival), Odysseus and Ajax (La MaMa), and The Great Zodiac Animal Race (Art Institute Chicago, Eighth Blackbird Studio, La MaMa, Detroit Institute of Arts).

Mr. Lee was a member of the original Broadway cast of War Horse (Tony Award) with puppetry by Handspring Puppet Company. In 2023, he designed puppetry for Mary Zimmerman’s production of Florencia en el Amazonas at the Metropolitan Opera and performed as a puppeteer in the production. He is a principal puppeteer in Anthony Minghella’s production of Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera with puppetry by Blind Summit Theatre. Mr. Lee debuted as a puppeteer at the Lyric Opera in Richard Jones’ Queen of Spades by Tchaikovsky. He directed and performed puppetry for Petrushka with the New York Philharmonic at London’s Barbican Centre and performed in Le Grand Macabre at Avery Fisher Hall conducted by Alan Gilbert, both created by Doug Fitch and Giants Are Small. He has performed in Dan Hurlin’s Obie-award winning puppet works Hiroshima Maiden, Disfarmer and Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed. Mr. Lee was a principal puppeteer in Lee Breuer’s epic puppet opera La Divina Caricatura at La MaMa.

Tom is co-director of Chicago Puppet Studio, a part of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. His theater design work includes puppets, projections and sets for theatre, dance, opera and film including Florencia en el Amazonas (Metropolitan Opera), Monkey (Whitesnake Productions, Paramount Theater, Boston), Vancouver (Ma-Yi Theater Company, UNIMA Citation), The Steadfast Tin Soldier (Lookingglass Theater, Jeff Award 2019), A Christmas Carol (Alliance Theater), Pinocchio (House Theater Chicago), The Scarlet Ibis (Prototype Festival, HERE Arts Center), The Poacher (Harvard Theatre Dance and Media), many pieces at La MaMa Experimental Theater, in addition to work with choreographers Yoshiko Chuma, Christopher Williams, Lisa Gonzales and Jonathan Meyer.

In 2005, supported by the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Designers, Tom spent two months studying traditional and contemporary puppetry throughout Japan. Here he met Koryū Nishikawa V, headmaster of Hachiōji Kuruma Ningyō (cart puppet theatre company) with whom he has maintained an ongoing creative relationship. Together they developed Shank’s Mare, an international puppet theatre collaboration that has toured throughout the US, Japan and France and received the 2016 Arlyn Award for Outstanding Puppet Theater Design. In 2023, Tom Lee and Koryū Nishikawa premiered their second collaboration, Akutagawa, at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival to high acclaim. Akutagawa will tour to Tokyo in 2024. 

Mr. Lee’s work has received support from The Jim Henson Foundation, The Japan Foundation NY, The TCG/Andrew W. Mellon In the Lab Program, The TCG/ITI Travel Grant Program, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, The Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, The NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Japan Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, The Puppet Lab at St. Ann’s Warehouse and artist residences at High Concept Labs at Mana Contemporary Chicago, Sarah Lawrence College, The Rhodophi International Theater Laboratory (Bulgaria), The Ringling Museum of Art, The Jim Henson Carriage House and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Tom was a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College for ten years and was co-director of the St. Ann’s Puppet Lab from 2009-2011. In 2021, he established the Chicago Puppet Lab with co-director Blair Thomas, seeking to develop and empower new voices creating original work for the puppet theater in Chicago. Tom has taught puppetry manipulation extensively throughout the US and internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Lincoln Center Theater, Northwestern University, Metropolitan Opera, University of Chicago, Seoul Institute of the Arts and the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. www.tomleeprojects.com