Experiments: A Picnic for Orpheus – June 16

The Experiments play reading series has provided a forum for talented playwrights and theatre makers to continue their creative process. The Monday night readings give emerging artists the opportunity to hear their developing works read by professional actors and receive valuable audience feedback. Experiments remains an artist driven service organized around shifting themes to allow a larger, under-served theater community to experience a greater diversity of programming.

A Picnic for Orpheus is a coming-of-age and a coming-out story set in a small Kentucky town in the late 1970s. As the title hints, the play rewrites and quotes gay mid-century playwrights Tennessee Williams and William Inge, as well as Thornton Wilder and other gay writers in the American theater canon, along with some Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Bible. This metatheatrical gay love story traverses religion, race, and sexuality—in short, the cultural/geographic divisions in America, then and now.

Director: Jeremy Webb

CAST

Evan Barnard (Tom Wingfield)
Ken Barnett (Rubin Wingfield)
Deborah Hedwall (Cleo Whittaker)
Caleb McKnabb (Bo Carter)
Jill VanVelzer (Amanda Wingfield)

BIOS

Paul David Young’s All My Fathers was presented by La MaMa E.T.C. in New York in fall 2019 as part of La MaMa’s 58th season. Evan Yionoulis, an Obie winner, formerly Professor in the Practice of Acting and Directing at Yale School of Drama and Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre for twenty years and now Richard Rodgers Director of Drama at Juilliard, directed the production, which was praised in The New Yorker (“In the hilarious first half of Paul David Young’s new play, David (Richard Gallagher), a version of the playwright, pays a reluctant visit to his childhood home, in Kentucky. His monster of a mother, Regina (a spectacular Deborah Hedwall), announces, through the fog of her dementia, that David’s true biological father was his (now dead) pediatrician, Dr. Woodman (a perfectly doctorly Brian Hastert), and not her long-suffering husband, Bill (touchingly performed by Jonathan Hogan). . .”); The Reviews Hub (five stars * * * * *: “All My Fathers is remarkable work and should not be missed.”); Interludes (Mr. Young’s new play All My Fathers (RECOMMENDED), which has been stylishly directed by Evan Yionoulis at La MaMa. . . . The acting is very good across the board, especially Deborah Hedwall and Jonathan Hogan.”); Theater Is Easy (“Director Evan Yionoulis handles the potentially heavy material with a light touch, keeping her cast’s heads above the flood of twists and turns, with Hedwall and Hogan turning in performances that are both hilarious and poignant.”); Theater Pizzazz (“Young’s humor is salient and sardonic. The actors are just terrific.”); and Lighting & Sound America (“Packed with curveballs, All My Fathers is also a work of considerable literacy.”)

Young’s 2017 Trump satire, Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal, performed by four clowns at Judson Church, was featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, Village Voice (“Voice Choice”), The Wall Street Journal (“views Mr. Trump through the devilish lens of the Faust story, but with a darkly comic—and very scatological—twist”), Hyperallergic (“With its trove of references and dizzying wordplay, it is an impressive feat of rhetoric, and ensemble members Ayun Halliday, Aidan O’Shea, Regina Strayhorn, and Ben Watts deftly deliver Paul David Young’s ambitious text at a Beckettian, breakneck pace.”), StageBuddy (“this is experimental, Brechtian, political theater done right, with every millisecond of the hour-long performance packed with nuance and perspicacity”), FrontRowCenter, and TheaterIsEasy.

His Kentucky Cantata premiered in 2015 at HERE in New York. Howard Miller on Talkin’ Broadway described it as “brilliantly composed” “Kentucky Cantata is a masterful work that is likely to stay with you for a long time after the final bows.” Miller picked Kentucky Cantata as one of the top 13 plays of Off-Broadway and Off- Off-Broadway for 2015: “Paul David Young’s devastating play about a family tragedy, a blend of naturalism and a fourth-wall-breaching expressionistic design, was given a stellar production at HERE Arts Center under the direction of Kathy Gail MacGowan.” Angel Lam, on The Easy, praised it as “a dark, poetic play” “Playwright Paul David Young’s poetic writing moves comfortably between the psychological world of the characters (where a character speaks directly to the audience) and the traditional dialogue between a pair of actors at a specific time and place.”

His Clown Play in the 2013 FringeNYC was called “completely unconventional” by The Village Voice, which wrote, “The script is intelligently bizarre: It’s Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects meets Marcel Marceau, and ultimately connects its disorienting components into an ode to clowning and the pain it sometimes masks.” Other strong press came from Upstage-Downstage (“Mr. Young is a talented wordsmith”; “able to turn seemingly random scenes into a real charmer of a play”; “you leave the theater having had a surprisingly good time.”); Theater Is Easy (“Paul David Young’s script is exceedingly clever”; “This is exactly the kind of thing theatre- goers look forward to fringe festivals for: daring, entertaining and ultimately non- mainstream fare.”); The New York Times (“In his dark comedy ‘Clown Play,’ Paul David Young intriguingly combines critical elements from the horror playbook: angry clowns, semiautomatic weapons, an abandoned house in the suburbs.”). It was a festival pick by The New York Times, New York.com, The New Jersey Record, The Producer’s Perspective, and Amsterdam News.

His play, In the Summer Pavilion, produced to critical acclaim in the 2011 FringeNYC and at 59e59 Theaters in New York in 2012, has been made into a feature film. In the Fringe, the play was a Backstage.com “Critic’s Pick” (“a deceptively quiet winner,” “richly compassionate”). Curtain Up! wrote: “a perfect little play,” “Let us have more Young.” NYtheatre.com commented: “edginess pervades this drama.” The Village Voice selected it as a “highlight” of the Fringe. New York Daily News praised its “achy, richly observant story” and picked it as one of two “gems” and “wonderfully realized works” out of the 194 shows in the Fringe. At 59e59 Theaters, the play again drew strong praise. Backstage.com again lauded it as “Compassionate, imaginative and unusual”: “Young’s play movingly depicts, as I wrote before, ‘the shifting, halting, yet unlimited hopes of youth and the realities of circumscription that experience brings.’” Backstage also appreciated the structure of the play: “What makes Young’s play so unusual is how each character comes into focus through the multiplicity of his or her possibilities.” Other praise came from Theater is Easy (“A sexy, searing offering of the vast possibilities of life and love”; “Young’s play will resonate long after the specific story or the events in the play fade from memory . . . Young’s words drip with the poetic reminder of who we once were and who we have the capacity to be.”); The New York Times (“ambitious” “finely drawn scenes” “eerie and hypersensitive – technical finesse elevates the play”); Theatermania (“never without inventiveness”; David Roberts, Theatre Critic (“perfect – a surreal trip not to be missed”); Reviews Off Broadway (“Fascinating – a simple story told with sincerity”); Theateronline.com (“Intriguing and effective – a winning concept”); The Advocate (“ambitious and haunting drama”); T&B on the Aisle (“Paul David Young’s play is rich in imagery; it teases with snippets of poetic philosophizing, and offers a satisfying amount of adventure.”); and Flavorpill (“The show is a clever and unpredictable look at the fallout from past intimacy.”)

His No One But You won the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and was a finalist for the Kendeda Fellowship. His one-act Aporia was a finalist for the Kennedy Center’s John Cauble Short Play Award and won third in New Works of Merit Playwriting Competition. His Christians Having Sex in Silence was a semifinalist in the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival. His work has been performed at MoMA PS1, Marlborough Gallery, the Living Theatre, apexart, The Brick, LMAK Projects, Lion Theatre, C.O.W. Theater, Kraine Theater, Emerging Artists Theatre, the Red Room, and the Kaffileikhusid in Reykjavik. His plays have been developed at Primary Stages, Abingdon Theatre, New York Theater Workshop, Alliance Theater of Atlanta, and the Kennedy Center.

His A Picnic for Orpheus was a semifinalist for the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center.

His translations, with Carl Weber, of Heiner Müller’s Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome and Macbeth were published in 2012 as Heiner Müller: After Shakespeare. Robert Woodruff directed a reading of his Titus translation (with Bill Camp, Reg E. Cathey, et al.,) at CUNY’s Segal Theater Center in New York in 2013. His translation of The Visual And Artistic Creative Works of C.G. Jung was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in fall 2018. He also translated Art & Crime by Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm (Seven Stories Press, 2022, reprinted 2023).

His critical writing has been published extensively in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press) and The Brooklyn Rail. New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workshop) selected him, along with Jess Barbagallo, to write Context Notes for the 2014-15 season. He has written considerably for Hyperallergic and Art in America, for which he covered the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, Performa, Pacific Standard Time, Art Basel Miami, and other events and exhibitions. His book newARTtheatre: Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic, a collection of interviews and conversations with artists appropriating theatre, was issued by PAJ in 2014.

He appeared as a principal performer (with Janie Geiser and Michael Buscemi), in Patricia Thornley’s feature film THIS IS US: Don’t Cry For Me, in the New York Film Festival, Views from the Avant-Garde at Lincoln Center in 2013.

His video Dad Died/Dead Bird in Winter was shown in February 2018 in the exhibition “The Nature Lab” curated by Eric Wolf, at LABSpace in Hillsdale, New York.

He is a graduate of Yale University (Phi Beta Kappa), Columbia Law School (Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar), and the New School for Drama (MFA Playwriting). He was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany.

He has had residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace, Millay Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Summer Conference. LMCC awarded him a five-month Process Space residency on Governors Island for 2015, where he conceived and performed Curtain Wall Part 3: An Immersive Landscape Theater Performance of Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” in which he swam across New York Harbor. The project includes process documentation and his 28-minute video, which has been shown at LMCC, The Emily Harvey Foundation, and Hercules/Art Studio Program. www.pauldavidyoung.com

JEREMY WEBB (Director) created Broadway Dreams for The Kurt Weill Festival (Dessau, Germany), & directed BackTalk by Rob Ackerman at Westport Country Playhouse (Script in Hand), The Soldier’s Tale and Camelot (Gulf Coast Symphony), Rabbit Hole (Actor’s Workshop), Secret Garden (South Carolina Festival of Flowers), I Carry Your Heart by Georgette Kelly for Hope on Stage (premiere). As an actor, Broadway: Take Me Out, Burn This. National Tour: Girl From The North Country. Off Broadway: The Glorious Ones (Lincoln Center Theatre, original cast recording), Tabletop (Drama Desk Award), Help (Shed), The Baltimore Waltz (Signature), among others.

EVAN BARNARD (Tom Wingfield) is a North Carolina-born writer and actor. He is a 2025 graduate of UNCSA’s BFA Drama program and a two year attendee of the University of Oxford Exeter College’s Summer Creative Writing Course. His favorite credits include Burrs in Lippa’s The Wild Party (UNCSA), Tobias in The Sound of Water (Edinburgh Fringe), and Brutus in Julius Caesar (UNCSA). Currently, he is working to mount a workshop of his original play, Mindlurk, in December of 2025. He has recently adopted a houseplant so that he may one day upgrade to cat. It is, as of the writing of this bio, miraculously alive. He lives in New York City.

KEN BARNETT (Rubin Wingfield). Broadway: Fun Home, Wonderful Town, The Green Bird. Off-Broadway: Mister Halston (Best Actor – United Solo Festival), Novenas for a Lost Hospital (Rattlestick), The Cradle Will Rock (Classic Stage), America Is Hard To See (HERE), The Light Years (Playwrights’ Horizons); Plenty, Fortress of Solitude, February House (Public Theater); Too Much Sun (Vineyard); La Ronde (HERE–Best Actor, Fringe Award); Debbie Does Dallas (Jane Street); The Whore of Sheridan Square (La Mama—NYIT Award nomination). Regional: The Waves, Private Lives, True West, Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (CT Critic’s Circle Award/San Diego Critics Circle Nomination), February House (CT Critics Circle Award), Next Fall, Burn This, Merrily We Roll Along. TV favorites: “The Equalizer”, “Godfather of Harlem”, “The Good Fight”,“American Crime Story: Versace”, Christophe on “Mozart in the Jungle”, “House of Cards”, “High Maintenance”, “The Knick”, “Mad Men”. Films include Lavender (Sundance & SXSW 2019, acquired by Fox Searchlight), Save the Date, Housemaid, Radio Killer, Admission, Ira & Abby, Friends With Kids, People Like Us, Puccini for Beginners. In addition to his performing career, Ken is a coach and teacher of Dreamwork for Artists. www.kenbarnett.net @kbnyc www.dreamwork.nyc

JETT (like the plane!) GOMEZ (Stage Directions) is an NYC-based actor who hails from sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. Most recently, he originated a character in the premiere national tour of Paw Patrol Live! A Mighty Adventure. He also workshopped and performed in a concert presentation of a new musical at 54 Below, Here I Am. He is soon to be seen in the upcoming NYU thesis film The Demon of Parce Manor as a damsel in distress pizza boy. Alum of The New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts for Musical Theatre Performance. He would love to thank his teachers, friends, family, and partner for their continued support and encouragement. Love you guys! 🙂 jettgomez.com

DEBORAH HEDWALL (Cleo Whittaker): Deborah Hedwall has been acting, teaching and directing in New York and Los Angeles for over 25 years. She received her professional acting training with Sanford Meisner and Uta Hagen. Selected On and Off Broadway, The Heidi Chronicles, Equus, Sight Unseen at Manhattan Theater Club for which she received an OBIE award and a Drama Desk Nomination for Outstanding Performance, Savage in Limbo at New York Stage and Film, Extremities at the Westside Arts Theater, Horton Foote’s Blind Date at Ensemble Studio Theater, Why We Have A Body at The Women’s Project, directed by Evan Yionoulis, Amulets Against The Dragon Forces at Circle Rep, Fall To Earth at 59 East 59, directed by Joe Brancato, All My Fathers at La MaMa directed by Evan Yionoulis, and GNIT by Will Eno, directed by Oliver Butler at TFANA.
Regionally she has worked at The Actor’s Theater of Louisville, The Eugene O’Neill Theater Conference, The Arena Stage, The New Play Festival at Sundance, The Long Wharf Theater, Yale Repertory, and Baltimore Center Stage where she appeared in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf directed by Ethan McSweeny, Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor in Men’s Lives (directed by Harris Yulin), Barrington Stage in Breaking the Code (directed by Joe Calarco), Hartford Stage in Christopher Shinn’s play An Opening in Time (directed by Oliver Butler), Outside Mullingar at BTF, directed by Karen Allen.
Television credits include Netflix’s Jessica Jones, Homeland, HBO’s Barry Levinson’s You Don’t Know Jack with Al Pacino, The West Wing, Law & Order, The Big C, Delocated, two seasons Deborah played the mother in the Emmy Award winning series I’ll Fly Away , Ina Muldoon on the Edward Burns series Public Morals, Numerous Law and Orders, Bull, Mary Star in the Apple TV series Ray James {War of The Worlds}, HBO series Mare of Easton. Selected Film, Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground, What Is Life Worth, After Yang by Kogonada, Shadrach, and House of Teeth, directed by Susanna Styron.
Deborah has maintained her acting studio dh&co in NYC for 30 years.

CALEB MCKNABB (Bo Carter) is an actor, singer, and writer from Charlotte, NC. He is a recent graduate of UNC School of the Arts from the School of Drama. While training he developed a love for stories that explore the black diaspora, queerness, and marginalized communities. He is thankful to be making his NYC theatrical debut in LaMama’s Experimental Play Reading Series.

JILL VAN VELZER (Amanda Wingfield): Most recently: Conor McPherson’s Girl From the North Country (Mrs. Burke–1st Nat’l Tour). Other tours: Phantom…, King & I (Anna). Awards: Backstage Garland (Best Actress – God Save Gertrude), L.A. Ovation (Best Supp. Actress—1776) Regional highlights: Old Globe, Pasadena Playhouse, Utah Shakes, oodles of Noel Coward & Jane Austen, various musical leading ladies.