NEW GAY STAGE: The Artists

Locations

For more on Next Magaizne's New Gay Stage
NEW GAY STAGE: The Curators
NEW GAY STAGE: The Business

Adam Bock - Playwright

Adam Bock is already a big deal, winning awards and nominations for plays like The Thugs, The Receptionist and Drunken City. As an out playwright, Bock’s ability to illustrate naked and painful truths, whether in a gay relationships, government torture or losing one’s senses, as he does in Playwrights Horizons’ upcoming A Small Fire, have made him a major artistic voice of the post-AIDS, post-9/11 community.

Adam Koch - Set Designer

It’s one thing to design Broadway-caliber sets but it’s a whole other thing to design for thousands of shirtless queens at the Black Party. Good thing Adam Koch has done both. The Carnegie Mellon grad has in a short time made a tremendous impact on stages across the country, most recently with the gay drama Loaded and the sold-out Chicago run of the recent Broadway hit Million Dollar Quartet. (AdamKochDesign.com)

Clint Ramos - Costumer/Set Designer

If Mad Men’s mid-century threads make you swoon, get to know Clint Ramos, who designed similarly dapper duds for Michael Urie and the cast of the 1950s gay history drama, The Temperamentals. A rising star in the mold of William Ivey Long, Ramos is also whipping up looks for the Public Theater’s The Winter’s Tale at the Delacorte in Central Park this summer, and the remounting of Angels in America at the Signature Theater in the fall.

Dan Fishback - Playwright/Performance Artist

Good things do come in small packages. Witness the elfin genius of Dan Fishback, 28, an acclaimed playwright and mainstay of the anti-folk scene both as a solo artist and with his bands Cheese on Bread and the Faggots. Don’t feel bad if Fishback doesn’t accept you as a Facebook friend right away—he’s busy prepping his new musical, The Material World, for a July staging at Dixon Place. (DanFishback.com)

Tim Cusack - Director/Writer

Next Magazine named Tim Cusack a Future Legend back in 2006 for his work with the six-part Caligula epic I, Claudius Live. He has not let us down. As co-founder of the queer theater ensemble Theatre Askew, Cusack, 41, has sought to redefine gay theater  with pieces like the hit historical comedy Cornbury: The Queen’s Governor, starring David Greenspan. Askew’s upcoming work, Home, shows how Cusack uses the power of live theater to help the gay community tell its story. (TheatreAskew.com)

Joseph Keckler - Writer/Performer/Musician

Joseph Keckler’s deconstructed covers, stream-of-consciousness monologues and original compositions grace alt-culture temples including Ars Nova, the New Museum and Envoy Enterprises—where the 26-year-old classically trained singer produces the monthly performance-art salon Inner Beauty Parlor. Even his debut at Joe’s Pub earlier this month was unorthodox:  an Easter-eve midnight Mass filled with operatic arias, blues dirges and Bowie songs. Hallelujah! (JosephKeckler.com)

Narcissister - Performance Artist

True, Narcissister is a woman, but when she covers her face in that mask, the Alvin Ailey-trained dancer transforms into a being that defies gender, sexual orientation or human form. As she’ll demonstrate in May’s This Masquerade at The Kitchen, the 38-year-old breakout star featured at The Box taps into ideas of identity and uninhibited sexual energy in a way we haven’t experienced since the rise of modern drag. (Narcissister.com)

Tarell Alvin Mccraney - Playwright

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s experiences as a gay black man are at the core of his award-winning shows, most notably last year’s Paris-Is-Burning-as-a-Greek-tragedy, Wig Out!, and this year’s “Brother/Sister” trilogy. The latter, rumored as a contender for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has made the Yale School of Drama grad a rising star in the theater world. McCraney, 29, has also given gay theater some much-welcomed diversity.

Taylor Mac - Theater Artist

Taylor Mac is a combustible bundle of glitter, dime-store costumes and smeared makeup that you can’t turn away from. The Young Ladies of… saw Mac, 36, strumming a ukulele in little more than a codpiece made out of an old bra, while his five-hour epic, The Lily’s Revenge, incorporated 30 actors, six directors and a mountain of sequins to tell the tale of a flower in love with a maiden. Check out Mac’s next tour-de-force performance at Joe’s Pub in May. (TaylorMac.net)

Tony Asaro - Composer/Lyricist

Like many great lyricists before him, Tony Asaro understands the power of words to transform emotion when set to music. His gay country western musical Our Country, which received the Planet Award for best new musical at the Planet Connections Theater Festivity, demonstrated Asaro’s gift to communicate through song with equal parts humor and grace. His distinctly gay voice, showcased in his next project, Going Nowhere, has put him on track for something special. (UnrelentingMonkey.com)

David and Joe Zellnik - Playwright/Lyricist and Composer

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: The Musical”? First staged in 2008,Yank!, the gay brothers’ queer romance set on the front lines of WWII, could have easily been ripped from today’s headlines. Given the show’s topicality, humor, tension and pathos, we’re not surprised that it’s invading Broadway next season. (YankTheMusical.com)

Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson - Director/Writer

Since 1999, Caden Manson, Jemma Nelson and their provocative alternative performance ensemble Big Art Group have used “Real-Time Film,” a hybrid of film and theater, to push notions of how performance can explore ideas of language and identity. Whether dressing up in furry costumes (S.O.S) or performing in front of a massive green screen (next year’s Flesh Tone), Manson, 38, and Nelson, 41, think outside the box, and aren’t afraid of using gay nightlife as an experiment, often finding inspiration in nightlife, using parties such as Spank as a drawing board. (BigArtGroup.com)

Jordan Seavey - Playwright/Performer

In only a few years Jordan Seavey and his theater group, CollaborationTown, have demonstrated his skill as an intelligent, literate gay playwright, earning him a place among the Public Theater’s Emerging Writer’s Group and highly sought-after guidance from Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. In  6969, Children At Play and his new work The Truth Will Out—a 2010 Finalist for the O’Neill’s National Playwrights Conference—Seavey, 29, looks at modern gay life with a raw truth and aggressive energy. (CollaborationTown.org)

Matthew Flower - Costumer/Performance Artist

Better known as Machine Dazzle, Matthew Flower, 37, has spread his performance petals through the Dazzle Dancers, the Pixie Harlots and at Splash’s Bawdville boylesque revue. But the towering talent has also blossomed with his outrageous costume designs, on view in Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge and in the upcoming Broadway Cares Easter Bonnet Competition and Night of a Thousand Stevies.