What We Do
Rising Phoenix Repertory
Winner of the Lucille Lortel Award, Caffe Cino Fellowship, and New York Innovative Theatre Award, Rising Phoenix Repertorywas founded in 1999 by Artistic Director Daniel Talbott, and produces primarily new plays – both in the Indie Theatre and Off-Broadway – in traditional spaces and site-specifically around New York City and regionally. Upcoming productions include Sunshine Evolutionby Lucy Thurber (San Francisco in 2020). Recent productions includeThe Conventby Jessica Dickey (produced with Weathervane and Rattlestick), Thieves(with Weathervane), A Fable(with piece by piece productions and Rattlestick), the Lucille Lortel Award-winning Off-Broadway run of All the Rage(with piece by piece and The Barrow Group), 3C(with piece by piece and Rattlestick), Elective Affinities(produced site-specifically with piece by piece and Soho Rep), Slipping(with piece by piece and Rattlestick), and Too Much Memory(with piece by piece), which transferred to the New York Theatre Workshop’s Fourth Street Theatre after winning the FringeNYC award for Outstanding Play in 2008. Rising Phoenix Repertory produces an ongoing series called Cino Nights, inspired by Joe Cino and his Caffe Cino – one of the original birthplaces of Off-Off-Broadway theatre – for which the company has commissioned over twenty playwrights to write new, full-length plays, which are fully produced site-specifically on a shoestring budget. Two volumes of Cino Nights plays have been published by The New York Theatre Experience, and the company publishes an ongoing theater magazine called Caffe Cino (edited by Talbott and Steve McMahon), available in bookstores and online. Rising Phoenix Rep serves as a home base for a company of theatre professionals that encourages an open exchange of work and ideas within the greater theatre community.
Cino Nights
Rising Phoenix Repertory produces an ongoing series called Cino Nights, inspired by Joe Cino and his Caffe Cino – one of the original birthplaces of Off-Off-Broadway theatre – for which the company has commissioned over twenty playwrights to write new, full-length plays, which are fully produced site-specifically on a shoestring budget. Two volumes of Cino Nights plays have been published by The New York Theatre Experience.
Caffe Cino: We were all very young; we were all innocent; we knew nothing. We lived in a kind of Eden called Greenwich Village–this was a long time ago.
Greenwich Village then was the center of all the new arts, and everyone was talented, and no one was famous, and we all spent our time with each other’s work, learning and cribbing.
And one of the theatre centers was Caffe Cino, where young playwrights who knew nothing about what they were supposed to be doing made exciting work, and the failures were as exciting as the successes.
It was Eden. I miss it.
– Edward Albee
CAFFE CINO Magazine
RPR’s ongoing theater magazine called Caffe Cino (edited by Daniel Talbott and Steve McMahon), available in bookstores and online.
