And God Created Great Whales is a haunting musical adventure that delves into the psyche of a composer who is trying to create an opera based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Desperately fighting against a disease that is eating away at his mind, he must rely on a tape recorder to remind him of yesterday’s instructions to himself. Rinde Eckert displays his full creative force in this frenzied, funny, romantic, and moving play.

Conceived by Rinde Eckert, And God Created Great Whales garnered the attention of critics and audiences alike when it premiered at Dance Theatre Workshop in early 2000. The New York Times hailed the piece as “total magic,” while Billboard called it “one of the most strikingly original works to be seen in New York.” After receiving an Obie Award and a Drama Desk nomination, the show was remounted at the 45 Bleecker Street Theatre and produced by Culture Project. And God Created Whales has been seen across the country, including at MassMoCa, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon, and Baltimore’s Center Stage. Now, under the original director David Schweizer, and performed by Nora Cole and Rinde Eckert, And God Created Whales returns to its origins to thrill New York audiences once more.

PRODUCTION HISTORY
In 1997, The Foundry Theatre in New York City commissioned Rinde Eckert to create a musical interpretation of Moby Dick. The work, And God Created Great Whales, was first workshopped and then presented at PS 122 as a work-in-development during January 2000, receiving its world premiere at Dance Theatre Workshop as a Foundry Theatre production in June 2000. Critical and audience response was extraordinary, including an OBIE Award and a DRAMA DESK nomination. Co-produced with the Culture Project, ...Whales was remounted in July 2000 at 45 Bleecker Street, with an additional New York run, again at Bleecker Street, from November 2001 to January 2002. The Foundry Theatre has toured And God Created Great Whales to MassMoCa (North Adams, MA), the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon, Baltimore’s Center Stage, the Mondavi Center at UC Davis in California, at London’s Barbican Center, and The Bonn Bienalle in Germany.

In September 2009, performed by Nora Cole and Rinde Eckert and again under the direction of David Schweizer, a new workshop of the production exploring a streamlined technical scheme was mounted at the University of Southern California. Through the generosity of Elisha and Lynn Wiesel in December 2011, the production was mounted in this new version and ran for four, invitation-only performances at the Beckett Theatre, followed by a week’s run at REDCAT’s Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater in Los Angeles in January 2012.

A special thank you to Melanie Joseph, Artistic Producer of the Foundry Theatre, for her crucial and continuing support.

Photo: Caleb Wertenbaker
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"Hunken is a monologist to be watched" -nytheatre.com

On a snowy Easter Sunday, Monica embarked on a bicycle journey across the vodka-soaked roads of Poland in search of the man who haunts her, a man of power, genius, fame and violence; her grandfather. Along her path, she squats and pogos with anarchist punks in old factories, barely escapes a knifing by Neo-Nazis, hides in churches and is hypnotized in a para-theatrical workshop. You will be led by many eccentric guides through this surreal landscape; a mohawked bike messenger, the ghost of a Norwegian bride, a girl with a third eye and your bewildered hostess, Monica Dudárew Ossetynska Hunken, heiress to cult and Slavic royalty.
Photo: Hunter Canning

An Irish government tribunal of inquiry into institutions responsible for cruel and inhumane treatment of children is in session. In the foyer, James X, one of those children, now a man anxiously prepares to offer the testimony which he hopes will unshackle him from the past. As he waits, James is confronted with the fact that the tribunal he is about to go before is part of the very same system that made prisoners of children like him and sighting this truth prompts him to tell the story that will really, finally set him free.

In the last decade, the Catholic Church and State institutions in Ireland and throughout the world have been the center of an emerging secret history. That history involves the sexual abuse and torment of tens of thousands of vulnerable children. This is the human story of one of those children who is trying to emerge from a place of darkness into the light—a light in which the human spirit is allowed to triumph into its full magnificence.

Running time: 75 minutes (no intermission)
Photo: Perry Ogden
James X is presented as part of Imagine Ireland, Culture Ireland's year of Irish Arts in America Find out more >>

Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, Paul O’Neill, the famously candid Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush and a 2008 adviser to Barack Obama, and Jesse LaGreca (blogger and writer for Daily Kos andOccupy Wall Street activist) meet for a high-voltage conversation about the rise, fall and bailout of Wall Street, the perils of speaking truth to power, and the tough choices ahead for America.

Part political thriller, part memoir, Granito takes us through a haunting tale of genocide and justice that spans four decades, two films, and filmmaker Pamela Yates’s own career. Granito is a story of destinies joined together by Guatemala’s past and of how a documentary film from 1982, When the Mountains Tremble, emerges as an active player in the present by becoming forensic evidence in a genocide case against a military dictator. In an incredible twist of fate, Yates was allowed to shoot the only known footage of the army as it carried out the genocide. Twenty-five years later, this footage becomes evidence in an international war crimes case against the very army commander who permitted Yates to film. Irrevocably linked by the events of 1982, each of the film’s characters is integral to the country’s reconstruction of a collective memory, the search for truth, and the pursuit of justice. Through the work of American filmmakers, forensics experts in Guatemala, and lawyers in Spain, the quest for accountability in Guatemala continues—with each individual contributing his or her own “granito”, or tiny grain of sand. (Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival 2011) US theatrical release Fall 2011. Granito will have its national broadcast premiere on the POV (Point of View) series on PBS in 2012.

Granito is being presented by the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Culture Project and POV (Point of View) are proud to be presenting partners of the film.

Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onís (U.S. 2011, Running Time: 100 min.) In English and Quiché and Spanish with English subtitles

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