Jonathan Warman (Director) New York Theatre: New York premiere of Tennessee Williams's Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws (La MaMa ETC, featuring Mink Stole and Everett Quinton), Andru’s Head (new musical, featuring Brooke Elliott (Lifetime's “Drop Dead Diva”)) (NeoNeo Theatre), Struck / Break (Emerging Artists Theatre), 348 (Dixon Place), The Physics of Love (TOSOS II), American Fabulous (NeoNeo Theatre), Jeffrey Dahmer Live (new musical), Groupies, In Loco Parentis (FringeNYC), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (Bullet Space, upcoming), Love in the Time of Chlamydia (Hard Sparks, upcoming),The Women of the Mahabharata (eyeBLINK). International: Dreams Reoccurring (Clubul CFR, Iasi, Romania and Nu Festival, Timisoara, Romania), Break (Dublin Gay Theatre Festival). Regional: Heads (Omaha Magic Theatre), The Strangest Kind of Romance (Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival, with national tour), Struck/Break (New Orleans Fringe Festival), Rogan Gosh (Star of the East, Omaha), Mad Forest, Hamletmachine (University of Nebraska at Omaha). Notable assistant credits: Stage Directors & Choreographers Society 50th Anniversary Gala (Assistant to SDC Board President Karen Azenberg),Three Sisters (La MaMa ETC, dir. Richard Schechner), Rosencrantz si Guildenstern sunt Morti (Teatru National Vasile Alecsandri, Iasi, Romania, dir. Ovidiu Lazar). Member of TOSOS II and associate member of SDC. He has served as Artistic Director of NeoNeo Theatre Company and Literary Manager for Access Theater, and is conceiver of White City, a new musical with music and lyrics by Pete Townshend of The Who, currently in development.
Jonathan Warman, Director
Associate Member
I recently directed one of Tennessee Williams most wildly creative late plays, Now The Cats With Jewelled Claws, starring Mink Stole and Everett Quinton. The production opened the 50th Anniversary Season at The Club at LaMaMa ETC, for a run from October 27-November 13, 2011. Conversations in a restaurant between two socialite women friends, a roughed up pregnant waitress, two young gay hustlers with pink leather jackets emblazoned with “The Mystic Rose”, and a lecherous, prophetic restaurant manager. Apocalyptic, funny, musical, physical, wild, futuristic, shamanistic.
The reviews for Now the Cats were fantastic! Here are some samples:
"The director, Jonathan Warman, has encouraged a flamboyant presentational style that emphasizes coherence over flair."
- Jason Zinoman, New York Times
"Thanks to the imagination of director Jonathan Warman and his enthusiastic cast, it makes for an outrageously entertaining 50 minutes...Warman mixes Williams' diverse elements skillfully, letting them jostle gently about, feeding rather than fighting each other." - Erik Haagensen, Backstage
“Fearlessly directed by Jonathan Warman, who fully embraces the play’s grotesque beauty.” - Brandon Voss, The Advocate
“Thanks to the surehanded staging from director Jonathan Warman and a fine cast, this mere squib of a play provokes both laughs and thought.” - Andy Probst, Theatermania.com
“Warman more than matches the piece’s phantasmagorical style...Warman elicits exquisite performances from his cast that are at once real and larger-than-life.” - Heather J. Violanti, NYTheatre.com
Erin Markey, Regina Bartkoff, Mink Stole and Everett Quinton in Jonathan Warman’s production of Tennessee Williams’s Now the Cats With Jewelled Claws. Photo credit: Jonathan Collins.
I am also directing a wonderful one-person show in early 2012, Nicole Pandolfo’s Love in the Time of Chlamydia – “One woman's wickedly funny search for love in a world full of absent dads, dirtbag boyfriends, and premature ejaculators.”
We're on the threshold of something...
“I’m thirty-fucking-nine years old. I don’t do white picket fences either. So what do you do if you’re not acquiring kids or adopting antiques? Yoga? I think you’re telling me to ‘grow up’ but I’m not too sure what that would look like, you know? What are we talking about, a Costco membership? Khaki pants?” - Tuffer, Act One, The Jamb by J.Stephen Brantley
Gay punks Tuffer and Roderick are turning forty. Neither wants to face it.
While Tuffer continues to smoke, snort and screw his way through Manhattan’s much younger gay male population, Roderick’s gone as straight as possible for activism and martial arts. With the arrival of Tuffer’s latest boy toy, Brandon, Roderick can take no more. After a disastrous quasi-intervention, he drags Tuffer to rural New Mexico for one last ass-kicking detox.
But when Roderick’s mother Abigail, a formerly successful folk singer, throws the guys a very organic birthday party, twenty years of tension comes to a head. Tuffer and Roderick must confront one another, and themselves, in a kind of exile on the high desert. Each is on the verge of something new, almost somewhere, in a jamb.
The Jamb is a coming of middle-age story for American queers who never quite embraced the identities prescribed them. Simply staged but aggressively theatrical, J.Stephen Brantley’s latest full-length play arrives uncomfortably post-Will And Grace to ask ‘What the fuck now?’
The Jamb has been produced as a staged reading in Dixon Place's HOT Festival of Queer Performance, at the 2009 Planet Connections Festivity, and in TOSOS Theatre's Chesley/Chambers Reading Series. It was produced by Eclectic Company Theatre in Los Angeles in January 2010.
Now we're looking to bring Tuffer and Roderick back to where their story began. If you'd like to contribute to the New York premiere of The Jamb, please contact Hard Sparks Theatre Company at Jamb@HardSparks.com
Untitled from J.Stephen Brantley on Vimeo.